Seeing a sudden increase in Quality Score

any reason why?

[Alexei]

Except adding/deleting some minor k/w, I din't change anything during several weeks (both in the PPC and on the site) and what I'm seeing is that quite general keywords are now 7/10. Other, more specific, are also doing better.

It's a local (city) campaign.

Any ideas why it's happening?

[ZeeOne]

The biggest quality score jump I've seen came after I made the kw's more appropriate to the ads I was displaying.

Maybe your keyword adding/deleting is doing just that; getting your keywords in line with your ads?

[Alexei]

The ads are the same for the k/w I'm seeing the increase for.

[briggidere]

Were the keywords you deleted of a much lower quality score? The AdGroups get an overall QS as well so by deleting poor QS terms from them can improve things as well.

[Alexei]

No k/w were deleted from those ad groups.

[briggidere]

I know on new accounts when you first create campaigns you are given the average advertiser QS for those terms and Google then adjusts your QS up or down over time depending on how you preform against that. Is it a newish account?

[Alexei]

No, it's an established account.

[Channel01]

I'm pretty sure the Quality Scores you see in the AdWords UI are only updated every few weeks (i.e. not in Real Time)so it's possible the improvement has been there for longer than you expected (and does tie back to some of the changes you made).

[LucidSW]

I don't believe QS is updated in the UI real time either. However, unlike Channel, I believe it may be more often than every few weeks. I think it may be once a day.

However, where did you start from? If from 6 to 7, I wouldn't call that sudden. You've just crossed the threshold between the two. To Google, your actual QS is not an integer but a number with many decimal places. Going from 6.493 to 6.502 with Google rounding off may make it seem like increasing one full point to you. That's why I wish Google would show QS with one decimal point.

What would be more unusual is a two or more point increase (or decrease) for a mature campaign.

There's also the possibility that Google has made a change in the algo which is affecting you. You do mention this is a local campaign. If they are now calculating QS at a more granular level (by city for example), your QS may have seen a boost as a result.

[eWhisper]

Quality Score is updated in the interface in these intervals (different on the backend):

QS as it relates to CTR - Daily
QS as it relates to relevance - about once a week (this isn't consistent at exactly weekly intervals)
QS as it relates to landing pages - about every 6 weeks
QS as it relates to the forumla itself - about once a month (again - not exactly monthly)

[LucidSW]

> QS as it relates to CTR - Daily
That correlates to my own experience although I've never seen anything saying as such by Google.

> QS as it relates to relevance
This I have seen documented by Google. They say "9 to 10 times per quarter" which would equal about every 9 days or less.

> QS as it relates to landing pages
Not sure why if you're checking a page for keyword relevance you couldn't check for other LP factors at the same time. Could this be a manual check?

As for changes in the formula itself, like any software like this, the system evolves. New ideas are put forward, tested and made live. Unless there's a major shift in thinking and calculating QS, we should not see any change.

[briggidere]

I believe QS is becoming more and more like pagerank, pretty useless as an indicator. The clarity of it is getting too confusing and making me think too much about things that may not matter or make much of a difference.

The ROI is the important figure and it's the only figure my clients care about. If the term has a 3/10, who cares as long as the returns are there.

As a campaign manager we try to make sure everything is as relevant as possible and we were doing that before they brought out QS, so why should we change the way we think about it just because there is another column with a 1-10 score.

[eWhisper]

> QS as it relates to landing pages

If you look at the QS in your account, there are two LP items:
1. Relevance
2. Load time

If these two items are good; then don't worry about your landing page (from a conversion standpoint yes, from a QS standpoint no).

If relevance is poor, common with one page wonder sites, bridge pages, squeeze pages, etc - then you'll need to redo the landing page and wait.

Of course, if your load time is poor you need to talk to your host - that should never be an issue and you have bigger problems to fix before worrying about QS.

[RhinoFish]

Exactly eWhisper, exactly! In your "If relevance is poor" sentence, I would just add something about reconsidering your keywords, ad text, and ad group structure too.

Loved your speed comment! We both know it never should be an issue - but we also know it often is. Garshk, bad speed reminds me of what Popeye used to say when he was both disgusted and exasperated with Olive Oyl... I is disgustipated. I'd change your "talk to your host" to "host and webmaster" - it's been my experience that the site / app layer shares the slow blame.

[eWhisper]

Good point on the host and webmaster.

For many companies - you're totally correct.

I'm my own webmaster in most cases, so I can either yell at myself or go talk to my host provider - I'd rather not complain to myself about myself :)

For low QS; I always start with organization (assuming its not LP) first. Poor organization can kill a campaign before it ever starts.

In the above post, I was referring just to landing page relevance poor - not the other 'relevance' poor factor.