What determines a Quality Score?  You’ve read the free guide and you know that the higher the quality score, the less expensive it is for you to buy traffic from Adwords.  But what is at the heart of the quality score?  How does Adwords assign a quality score?

* CTR within Adwords

The most important factor of your quality score is it’s CTR.  Google realizes that everything it’s robots scan a page for can be manipulated.  In fact, Google encourages this manipulation.  Google tells you that the landing page must be relevant to the keyword.  Therefore Google expects you to optimize your landing for a keyword.

But at the end of the day, the CTR is pretty much written in stone.  The CTR is the clicks divided by the impression.  If a human consumer find your ad relevant to the keyword / search term, they click your ad.  Conversely, human consumers won’t click on irrelevant ads.  Google counts the CTR so heavily because it’s based on the real human visitors to their search engine.  Google is essentially letting the consumers drive the process.  Google does this because the daily human consumers are a better judge of relevancy than any program.

Google assigns initial quality scores based on other factors.  Nut once the impressions start, your ad will sink or swim based on it’s CTR.  It’s a Darwinian game of survival of the fittest.

* Ad Copy and Ad text relevance to query

Google examines your ad copy when assigning a quality score.  Google likes to see the keywords in the ad headline or text, and rewards you with a higher quality score.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion tokens are not counted as keywords.  So while Dynamic Keyword Insertion is likely to appeal to human consumers, Adwords will not boost your quality score.  In fact DKI may damage your quality score id you remove the actual keyword from your ad in favor of the DKI tokens.

* Historical keyword performance

Google keeps your keyword historical data, primarily the CTR.  That means deleting a keyword will not remove the already generated data.  So, if you are deleting keywords and re-adding them to try to clean the slate, it’s probably a waste of time.

Adwords considers the recent history to have more impact.  This allows you to adjust poor performing keywords in the hopes of increasing their CTR.  Without this consideration any keyword that performed badly historically would have a low quality score.

Deleting keywords is still an important task of campaign management.  Like pruning plants, you must remove poor performing keywords to raise the overall quality of your campaign.

*  Landing Page Relevance

A relevant landing page lowers your minimum bid and potentially increases your ad position.  It doesn’t directly affect quality score.  However, an ad will a higher position because of a targeted landing page will generate a better CTR.  A better CTR will raise the quality score.

In conclusion, Google has this to say about quality scores.

“There are over 100 factors that can affect quality score. However, not all will be triggered depending on the conditions involved.”