Google AdWords Quality Score

17 Feb 2007 @ 10:30 PM

Looking through one of my Google AdWords account I saw the new quality score displayed. As Yahoo had put in a little shaded in bar showing your quality score on a 5 point scale, Google decided they’d get in on the act. Instead of 5 non-defined points, Google went for 3 vague descriptive words:- “Poor, OK, and Great”. One interesting this is that they show you what the minimum bid for a particular keyword is. As you can see in this example culled from one of my accounts, the “Great” keyword has a min. bid of 4 cents, the “OK” keywords have a range of 6 cents to 20 cents, and the “Poor” keywords all have a 30 cent min. bid.

Quite a difference there. If all of the keywords manage to somehow come in at their minimum bid, or that multiple holds at higher prices, that’s 7.5 great keywords for the same price of 1 poor keyword. Now in reality that multiple doesn’t hold, but there is a differential. Looking at the average CPC for these keywords, the “Poor” keyword is costing us about 33% more than the “OK” keywords, now as to whether the “Poor” keyword is worth that from a conversion perspective, that’s a different story, but if you see this in your AdWords, that’s something that you do want to look at.

Now, I’ve looked through several campaigns, and it appears that “Great” always has a minimum bid of 4 cents. “OK” ranges from 5 cents to 20 cents, and “Poor” is 30 cents and up (I saw some as high as a dollar - naturally these were ones that had been labeled “Inactive for Search”).

Categories: Google, PPC Posted By: Simon Heseltine
Last Edit: 17 Feb 2007 @ 10 30 PM

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