business widgets vs professional widgets

QS is counter-intuitive -- what am I missing?

[chewy]

We sell widgets. Lots of widgets. Literally over a thousand types of widgets.

We have an ad for business widgets. It has business widgets in the URL and in the adword text. It gets a QS of 3 for "business widgets".

Business widgets as a phrase appears 7 times on the page, all in a natural fashion.

The term professional widgets also appears on the page once - it does not appear in the ad text, nor does it appear in the URL. It gets half the CTR that business widgets get - but it has a QS of more than twice of business widgets. (yes, it gets a QS of 7 with half the CTR and zero mention in the ad...)

What am I missing here? Everything I read / re-read / heard or learned in experience says something is wrong here.

[areyougellin]

Maybe "business widgets" has historically performed really poorly for other advertisers. In which case, all you can do is continue to build positive history within your own account and hope Google sees this.

[LucidSW]

The QS is telling you that you are doing well for THAT keyword compared to others. Doesn't matter the CTR. You can have QS of 10 or any other value for any click rate.

The QS by the way is normalized by position. You don't say the position of your keywords but I doubt they have roughly the same position. You can't compare straight CTRs. That's why QS was invented.

But even if both had the same position, "professional widgets" has a better CTR than most other advertisers and you get a QS of 7. Must be something in your ad that attracts the clicks. "business widgets" may have a better CTR than your other keyword but it's not as good compared to other advertisers (your ad is not as good) using it and why your QS is lower.