The Quality Score Checklist

Target Readers: Beginner - Intermediate

Since the changes to quality score (QS) many people have reported sporadic changes in their quality scores, now reported out of 10. Some have argued that the quality score is irrelevant, which is partly true (I will discuss this in a future post).

Whatever the case I thought it might be beneficial to create a checklist that you should go through when trying to determine why your QS is too low or not has high as you would like it to be.

1. Tightly themed Adgroups - the first thing you ought to determine is if your adgroups are as tightly themed as possible. This may even mean having one keyword in an adgroup. Look carefully at the keywords in each of your adgroup, if you can think of a way to break them down into two or more groups that this will only help your quality score. For a detailed explanation see Sebastian Graham's blog post on the topic.
2. Use your keywords in your ad - Now that you have tightly themed keywords, make sure you use each keyword in your ad. As a guidline your keyword should appear at least once in the title, in each description line and then in the display URL. As Google bolds the searched term in your ads make sure that, where possible, the keyword appears as the first word in the title.
3. Use keywords on your landing page - Once you have tighly themed adgroups with your keywords in your ads, make sure that your landing page has the keywords in the titles and that the "keyword density" is high (but not so high as to be unreadable or unengaging to users)

If you ensure that your campaigns follow these three principles, your quality score should be in the 7-10 region. Some though may find that their QS does not improve. Why?

It could be one of many things, but the solution to a common problem is to increase the "user experience". This relates primarily to your landing page. I would reccomend reading through this post on the official Google blog. My next blog post will dissect and translate this post and reccomend practical ways in which you can improve the "user experience" on your landing pages. Keep an eye out for it!

Checklist Summary

• Do you have tightly themed Adgroups?
• Can you break existing Adgroups into two or more adgroups?
• Do you use your keyword in your text ad?
• Does your keyword appear at least once in the two description lines, the title and display URL?
• Does your landing page have the keyword in the URL?
• Is your keyword in the title of your landing page?
• Do you have a good keywords density on your landing page?

A Note:
I have started to write which readers I am targetting with each post. I understand that some of you may be at different levels and so I will try and accomodate for all readers experience and knowledge. This post was aimed at beginner to intermediate Adwords users.