How do you analyse QS of your campaigns

Hi,


QS is a very important aspect, good quality score can be obtained by:
1. Relevant Landing Page
2. Ads containing keywords
3. Good quality ads
4. See the product you sell on site matches your ads
5. Content on site should be relevant


These points if you shall follow then for sure your QS would be good.

While you should apply a weighted average calculation, and impressions is the value to weight on, there are two major issues with QS that make this irrelevant:

1. Google calculates QS based on the keyword without regard to the match type.

The broad, phrase and exact variations are all treated the same. They are compared to the exact search match. So, "square widget" and [square widget] as well as the broad match (but not the BMM) will have their QS calculated compared only to the exact search "square widget". That's why the QS of those keywords will be the same in an ad group.

2. QS is not the whole number you see in your account.

In the background, there are many decimal points. So your QS as shown is not 7 but may be anywhere between 6.500000 and 7.4999999. This "real" QS is the one actually used for position and CPC calculations.

Your QS does change every time there's a search on your keywords, even if you are not part of an auction at that moment. It is of course small but it does change. This means that without changing anything, your QS as you see it may never change.

Without the true, many-decimal QS, doing anything with the QS you do see serves little purpose.

Another thing is that typically in a group, you will (or should) be using the same keywords, or at least the same idea. One group will be "wooden round widget(s)" and another "metal round widget(s)" and so on. You would not mix the wooden with the metal nor the round with the square widgets, not unless there's a good reason to do so. This will make the QS (as shown) the same or nearly so. There will be no big variation and QS will be 4-5, 5-6, 6-7, 7-8, 8-9, 9-10 if there's any variation at all between keywords.

If you do have a big variation such as in your example of QS of 2 and 10, your problem is that you are mixing keyword topics such as wooden and metal together as well as round and square. This large QS variation is a clue that you are doing so and the solution is to have more granular groups.

I understand what you are saying. But still, how do you evaluate quickly an important account (100k+ keywords , 100K+ impressions per day) in term of QS. And how do you evaluate if you improve or not in term of QS if you don't create some kind of macro dashboard ?

A macro dashboard is meant to give you an idea on where you stand. For example i can say for myself after doing the exercice today than i lost 2 points on my quality score in 8 month. It says something and i still think that if the solution is in the details, it is an interesting KPI to have and monitor. Don't you think ?

Edit:
If someone is interested on how to use adwords scripting to calculate this i just made blog post about it:
http://marketingdungeon.net/using-ad...f-your-account