Adwords account performance question

Hi Dave,

Yes, absolutey!

Here is what AdWords has published on their support site about Quality Scores and how they are calculated:

Quality Score for Google and the Search Network
While we continue to refine our Quality Score formulas for Google and the Search Network, the core components remain more or less the same:

• The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on the Google domain; note that CTR on non-Google sites (such as AOL.com) only ever impacts Quality Score on our search partners – not on Google
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• Your account's performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
• Other relevance factors

Note that there are slight variations to the Quality Score formula when it affects ad position and first page bid:

• When calculating ad position on a search partner site, Quality Score considers the CTR on that particular site in addition to CTR across all non-Google search partners as a whole.
• For calculating first page bid, Quality Score doesn't consider the matched ad or search query, since this estimate appears as a metric in your account and doesn't vary per search query.

Source: http://support.google.com/adwords/bi...n&answer=10215

The good news is that your "account history" seems to be weighted toward the most recent results. So if you improve your overall account CTR, you will improve your account level QS factors within a relatively short period of time.

Hi Lucid,

It is an easily observed factor. Here is how you can test and verify that it does indeed exist:

• I'm sure, like me, you take on clients from time to time that have earned poor QS across an account due to poor keyword targeting and/or poorly written ads. Create a brand new campaign and load it into that account.
  
• Next, load the exact same campaign into an account with an excellent CTR and QS history.
  
• Observe the initial QS for keywords in those 2 accounts.

Come back here and report what you find!

And yes it is weighted toward recent history, so it isn't the end of the world for that account. It is helpful to recognize the effect of account level QS to prevent a few poor performing campaigns from raising the costs of better performing campaigns within the same account.

Hi Lucid

Interesting that you pointed this out. Years ago, at a conference (I don't recall which one), a Google engineer was being questioned about what a particular policy "really" meant. He explained that Google has a team of linguistic scientists that pour over every single word of their published policies and guidelines to ensure that they mean exactly and precisely as worded. That the entire team must form a consensus that each and every word is necessary and accurate to convey the correct information. I was astonished and impressed that a company would go that far to ensure the accuracy and precision of their published documents.

Ever since hearing that claim, the skeptic in me has looked for misstated wording in the published help and support sections of their published documents to see if such an amazing claim could actually be true. After years of never catching, or even hearing of a verifiable misstatement, I am inclined to believe that what they state is more likely to be true, and accurate, than not.