Whether you have a Grant or regular AdWords account Google has provided a clear way to improve the results you get from your AdWords spend. Quality Score (QS) has been specifically designed by Google to encourage ads more relevant to the searcher and potentially cheaper for the advertiser. Improve your QS and get more clicks for less money.

possible Quality Scores ?

The cost per click (cpc) that the advertiser pays for a keyword is directly related to its QS. Craig Danuloff has crunched a lot of numbers to show the effect of QS on the cpc. Briefly, a QS of 7 means that you are paying the standard price for each click. For a QS below 7 you are penalised eg a QS of 4 means you will be charged a 75% Premium. However a Quality Score of 1.0 means that you get a discount of 30%. So what are the factors that Google takes into account when calculating the Quality Score for each Keyword/Ad combination. For the Search Network Google lists 8 factors. However the most significant is the Click Through Rate or CTR – specifically the CTR for the Exact Match version of the keyword.  Siddharth Shah has crunched some different numbers and his show the correlation between CTR and Quality Score. The higher the CTR the higher the QS. So, a keyword CTR in the range of 2 or 3% will get you a QS of 7 but you will need a *much* higher CTR to get the magic of QS 8, 9 or 10 discounts. Looking at my own keywords with a QS of 10 ( not as many as I would like sadly )  all of them have an Exact Match CTR of over 30%. So no surprise, Google does not easily give away AdWords discounts. Typically you will only get that kind of CTR on very specialise keywords or Brand Terms.

One way to improve your CTR for a keyword is to lower the number of Impressions that do not receive a click. Identifying possible Negative keywords that will help you is an ongoing task that pays dividends. One way to find search terms that on Broad Match trigger your ad is to look in the Search Query Report. For some accounts this now shows Impressions that get no Clicks. Another way to is to enter the keyword as a search term and then check the terms shown in Google Suggest. Also some terms shown in Related Searches under More Search tools can give suitable negatives.

Note that Google makes public a linear QS scale of 1 to 10. However it is almost certain than internally they use a log scale such as the one used for Page Rank where one number is vastly greater than the previous one eg 2 is 100 times greater than 1 and so on. This means QS will in reality cover a very wide range. So when you reach the magic 7 keep improving the CTR as it is very likely that Google has a more refined internal scale and even though you cannot get above 7 your ad position and cpc may will continue to improve.