Quality Score and Keyword Relevance

[rwilson]

I put in a new ad group with the with an ad headline "Green Widgets", I put in the keyword as a phrase match "green widgets". The quality score immediately after I put it in showed up as 7/10, after a few minutes it dropped to 3/10 and says keyword relevance is poor. I'm confused.

Does this have to with the landing page as well? I have the words on my page, but not in the same phrase match. for example my landing page says "Green Shiny Widgets" rather than just "Green Widgets"

Any advice or clarification would be appreciated.

[LucidSW]

QS is first calculated as an estimate based on your ad mostly, comparing it to similar ads. A second pass is checking your landing page. Since that doesn't happen right away, but usually within 30 minutes, your QS can go down (or up) after the second pass. The second pass checks for relevancy as well as following the guidelines.

Once these first couple passes done, QS is calculated in the normal manner. Most of this is based on CTR. QS also needs enough data before it stabilizes. You could have seemingly high CTR but average QS in the beginning because of this. Of course, you don't know the average CTR, what the calculation uses as the base, so even with a high CTR, you could still be average and thus warrant an average QS.

The algo is pretty smart but sometimes seems rather stupid. It appears it knows that "green shiny widgets" is relevant to "green widgets". At least, 99% of the time. The other percent of the time, it looks like it can't see the difference between the plural and singular or other similar terms (chiropractor vs chiropractic for example).

I've been told that keyword relevancy can change if your click rate is not high enough. I can vouch for that. The system seems to re-adjust the relevancy simply because click rate is low. The threshold seems to be when your QS falls below 4. It's not always correct but it's an indication to you that your keywords and ads are poor.

[rwilson]

Cool thanks, that helps clear it up. I have noticed on previous keywords that had low score, the QS increased when the CTR was good.