AdWords Quality Score
Quality score issues on AdWords accounts one of the important metrics is “Quality Score” yet recent problems with the calculation of this figure are causing concern amongst PPC advertisers.
The quality score is a number between zero and ten which is assigned by Google AdWords to a keyword and indicates how effective Google sees the ad. This is a very important metric as this figure impacts future serving of the ads. Google likes to reward ads they consider good and penalise ad they consider bad. This means that well run accounts perform better and better whereas poorly managed accounts perform worse and worse with time.
A noticed drop in Quality score is therefore a major concern, but especially when it appears to be an error in the AdWords system itself.
According to Google, the official advice is:
[We] can confirm that this issue did not impact serving (i.e., the system has been correctly computing auction-time Quality Score this entire time for ranking and pricing purposes).
This issue was limited to the reporting of Quality Score, and the fix should be live for all within the next 24 hours. For those keywords with a status of Low search volume, the fix should be live within the next few days.
And yet this did not correspond with observations on all accounts and it has been necessary to make more adjustments than necessary during November 2010 to maintain client accounts at high performance.
This is an advantage of using an agency for managing your PPC; they are aware of issues affecting many accounts and able to adjust the accounts accordingly.
Cornish WebServices manage a range of client PPC accounts, and continually monitor these to obtain maximum performance.
Published on 06/11/2010
