Correct me if Im wrong, but I thought that Quality Score was mostly related to the relevancy of keywords, ads and landing page. My campaign has 5 ad groups. In one ad group, I have the word solder preform. I have all three match types for the word. I have 4 ads that all say solder preforms. My landing page is optimized for the word solder preforms. How can my q.s. be poor? Its not possible for me to be more relevant!!
Your quality score is indeed made up of all of those things but probably the biggest component is click through rate (CTR) and that will be estimated for a new ad until enough data has been collected. Try increasing your maximum bid until you are in average position 4 or higher.
Though Landing page, ads, keywords etc. holds a lot of importance for quality score but at the same time you need to check what CTR you are getting for your ads. Simply using your keyword in landing page and ads does not guarantee a good quality score. The combination has to work for you so that the CTR shoots up. If that is not the case, then no matter how relevant your ads and landing page are, you will not get a good quality score.
Why do people keep repeating this? It is simply not true that CTR is such an important factor in QS! It is quite possible to achieve a QS of 9 or 10 with a CTR of 0! OP. No, you are not wrong and I do sympathize - the QS system is quite baffling. For example, I have many keywords with QS 9 or 10 (AND very low or non-existent CTR!) yet, when I add "UK" to the term the QS drops to 7 despite the fact the terms with "UK" are in my landing page titles, ad titles, and page text!
In my view, CTR is all relative to how the keyword has performed in the past and the CTR of your competitors. The only way a CTR of 0% would remain having a good QS would be if the other advertisers also were getting 0. Very unlikely, but without taking things to the extreme (Google will give the keyword time before deciding to drop the QS) it's possible to keep a high QS with a low CTR. 1 thing to remember is that natural listings can have a big effect on CTR. If the natural listings are inviting and tell the user what they want to know - more than often they won't bother with the sponsored ads.
I agree with most part. CTR is indeed important and if you are CTR is lower than 70-80% of the ads in your niche than you will have a poor quality score.
I would certainly accept that performance compared to competitors and relative to the ad's position (the two are, anyway, dependent on each other to some extent) is a factor and, I think, much more important than the actual CTR figure. There is certainly some truth in that though the willingness of searchers to click on sponsored ads depends very much on location, i.e. in some countries a majority of searchers will happily click a sponsored result while in others the majority will shun paid ads. Sorry, but that is pure speculation - you cannot possibly know your relative performance compared to the other ads in your niche! (Or, is Google telling you something they keep hidden from the rest of us?) Also, it cannot be correct since Google evaluate CTR against position not competitor performance.
This is not speculation, but based on pure logic. You need to understand how an algorithm works. Having invovled with adwords for 4 years now, I strongly feel that this is one of the ways for them to arrive at quality scores of keywords. I am not saying this happens for sure, but its a strong possibility specially if you try to understand and dig deeper into the google algorithm and then connect those thoughts with google's way of rewarding good ads and penalizing bad ads.
In other words, it is speculation! Whether your CTR is 'good' or 'bad' is based on the keyword performance when compared to the historical CTR of ads in the particular position it appears in, i.e. Google know what to expect for any given position and compare your performance against that NOT against your competitor's performance.