Before proceeding to understand the process of bringing back Quality Score, we need to understand what is Quality Score and why is it so important.
What is Quality Score?
Quality Score is Google’s rating of the quality and relevance of both your keywords and PPC ads. It is used to determine your Cost Per Click (CPC) and multiplied by your maximum bid to determine your ad rank in the ad auction process. A Quality Score relies on many factors, like:
- Your click-through rate (CTR).
- The relevance of each keyword.
- Landing page quality and relevance.
- The relevance of Ad text.
I recently delivered this Hangout On Air (Quality Score: AdWords Key to ROI) for Google addressing all Google Partners in India where I explained in depth the concept of Quality Score and how it can help you increase your profitability and scale your business rapidly. Check out this HangOut.
Why is Quality Score so important?
Quality Scores have a massive influence on the cost and effectiveness of your paid search campaigns. As your credit score controls whether or not you qualify for a loan, similarly Google Quality Score affects how your PPC ads perform and how much you pay for each click.
What to do if your Quality Score just drops for some keyword(s)?
You have been optimizing your campaigns to increase your Quality Score, CTR, conversions, etc. One fine day, you noticed your Quality Score has dropped for certain keywords.
Don’t panic, just follow this step-by-step process to gain your Quality Score.
This Google’s obscure and mostly ignored tool shall help you identify and re-gain your Quality Score. This technique assumes that you are tracking the Quality Score of your keywords on a regular basis through Keyword reports.
- To begin with, just check the trend and find out the period when you noticed the drop in Quality Score for the keyword(s) in question.
- Log in to your AdWords account and go to Change History and select the appropriate date range. It will show you all the changes you ever made to your account.
- Select Change Type: All
- Download the change history as a CSV file.
- Open the CSV file in Excel or any similar spreadsheet. Now you will have all the changes made by you or your team in your account.
- Filter the data for the Ad group to which the problem keyword belongs.
- Now you shall see all the changes done by you or your team like changing the Ad Copy, Created New Ads, Paused or Deleted Ads, New destination URL specified, etc.
- Identify the change or list of changes done to that Ad group.
- Start undoing the change(s) in the Change History in your AdWords account by clicking Undo button along with the change.
And that’s it you are done! Most likely this will help your QS reach back to its original level.
How does it work?
If you can identify the reason or change which caused the drop in your Quality Score then you can almost take it back to where it was. The process facilitates in the identification of factors that you changed before the Quality Score dropped and once you identify the factor(s) you can undo them and gain back your quality score.