Increasing AdWords Quality Score by 500% in Just 10 Minutes

In case you don’t know, AdWords utilizes what Google calls “Quality Score” which basically determines how much you will have to pay for each click. The higher your quality score, the lower your overall CPC (cost-per-click) will be. As with most other things related to Google, the algorithm that calculates the Quality Score is secret, so you won’t know how to increase your Quality Score until you test changing different things.

The general consensus is that the Quality Score is calculated using your click-through rate, ad copy and its effectiveness, and landing page. So if you have a low Quality Score, usually you would try to improve those three things.

Recently, we had a client that struggled with low impressions and low quality clicks because of very low Quality Scores. Most of their keywords had a Quality Score of only a 1 and the highest was only a 3.

We created a landing page to try and fix the problem but it did not have any major effect. Then we spoke to Google to see why the client’s Quality Scores were so low and they told us they should be better, but they can’t help us.

So the next step we did was duplicated the campaign with the AdWords Editor, and then re-uploaded all of the keywords. The results from that were drastic. Most of the Quality Scores for our keywords jumped from 1’s to 5’s and 6’s. And the amount of time it took? Only 10 minutes!

Below are the screenshots showing the changes.

Original Quality Scores

New Quality Scores