Google is Changing AdWords Quality Score: Here’s Why It Matters

Recently, an article published on Search Engine Land (SEL) said Google made more than 1,600 changes in how their search engine works. Wow. I’d like to draw your attention particularly to the changes made to the Google AdWords Quality Score reporting.
Quality Score helps you evaluate the relevance of your account, as well as various factors on your site’s landing page. It is used to determine your keywords’ quality, as well as ads and landing pages. The ratings go from one to 10, and they are reshaped every time someone Googles something using your targeted keywords (you can learn more about Quality Score in our AdWords guide).

Advertisers using AdWords will now have seven new reporting columns at their disposal, hopefully, helping them get a deeper understanding of their campaigns and affiliate programs.

The columns are:

• CTR
• Ad Relevance
• Landing Page Exper

The need to hover over the tiny bubble icon next to keywords in order to reach the Quality Score factor status is thus eliminated.

However, these four should be of even bigger help:

• Score (hist.)
• Landing page exper. (hist.)
• Ad relevance (hist.)
• and CTR (hist.)

With these, you can trace back the last known score in a date of your choosing (goes back to January 2016).
Obviously, explaining through examples is the easiest way to go, so take a look at the screenshot below. On it, we’ll see that it’s February 10 and that you’re looking for the Quality Score for the keyword Oranges, for the date range of February 3 – 8. Using the “Quality Scores (hist.)” column, it’s easy to see that the last known Quality Score for that timeframe was 4/10. You can also see the historical score for each day in that timeframe. Looking at individual days, it is even possible to see how the end-of-day Quality Scores changed in time. You will also notice that on dates February 7 and February 8, there is no score. That is because the system did not have enough input, either in impressions or clicks.

These are important changes. With them, advertisers will get a better glimpse on how things like changes to ad optimization affect their Quality Score, consequently impacting their overall account performance.