To put it simply, Quality Score is a metric assigned by the search engine to determine your Cost Per Click and placement on the search results page. It’s in their best interest to place ads that will garner the most clicks near the top – more $$$ for them. This also ensures that their users have the best possible experience. When someone searches for “pay gas bill” (a keyphrase we recently used here) they should be presented with ads that would help them do just that. Our Quality Score for this keyword is a solid 7/10 because of a few key factors:

-the keyphrase is in the the body of the ad and the URL
-we have a high Click Through Rate (CTR)
-the landing page is relevant to the ad

Yet when I take a look at keywords of ours with low quality scores I see we have taken the same steps mentioned above yet the score is lower. This is the mystery of the Quality Score and don’t expect to solve it. But don’t let that get you down. If enough people are clicking on your ad and buying what you’re selling (both literally and figuratively) then that little imaginary number invented by Google and Yahoo shouldn’t matter to you at all.

-Rob (SEO Coordinator)