Internet Marketing Services

As you might already know, Google is very secretive about its algorithm on how Quality Score is calculated. Every now and then, there will be blog articles trying to speculate what factors actually affects quality score (and yes, this article is one of them, sadly), and they usually revolves around the keywords’ click through rate or relevance to the ads.

Just to refresh your memory, here is how Google defines quality score:

A Quality Score is calculated every time your keyword matches a search query — that is, every time your keyword has the potential to trigger an ad. Quality Score is used in several different ways, including:

• influencing your keywords’ actual cost-per-clicks (CPCs)
• estimating the first page bids that you see in your account
• determining if a keyword is eligible to enter the ad auction that occurs when a user enters a search query
• affecting how high your ad will be ranked

In general, the higher your Quality Score, the lower your costs and the better your ad position.

Quality Score helps ensure that only the most relevant ads appear to users on Google and the Google Network. The AdWords system works best for everybody — advertisers, users, publishers, and Google too — when the ads we display match our users’ needs as closely as possible. Relevant ads tend to earn more clicks, appear in a higher position, and bring you the most success.

As I work on our clients’ account, I noticed that the quality score for some keywords fluctuates from day to day, which is consistent with Google’s definition: Quality Score is calculated your keyword matches a search query. Therefore, there can be thousands of different quality score being assigned to a single keyword every day, of course the average quality score for keywords will be different from day to day.

But one interesting factor that I noticed is that sometimes early in the day when the keywords have only gotten a few impressions (let’s say, 500 impressions) and the CTR is roughly 1%, the QS for the keywords will be 6 (or any number), but as the day goes on and the number of impression increases to, let’s say 1500, and the same 1% CTR will only gives the keywords a lower quality score, say 4.

I don’t have a huge enough data base to test this trend, but I do suspect that keyword popularity is also part of the quality score algorithm, and the more popular the keyword, the higher the CTR it needs to have in order to have high quality score.

If you have noticed a similar trend, please kindly let us know.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services. If you need help with PPC management or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies reduce their paid advertising cost by as much as 48% and increase AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. See our internet marketing case studies.