Just been wandering around Google's Help system, and I noticed something that I hadn't seen before. Here's how Google describes the process for calculating the Minimum Bid Quality Score and the Ranking Quality Score: "For defining minimum CPC bid requirements and your overall keyword quality within AdWords, your Quality Score evaluates your keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) and the relevance of the keyword, your ad's text, and landing page. " "For ad ranking, our system evaluates how well your ad has performed in relation to a user's specific query. Our system therefore considers your keyword's CTR, ad text relevance, and your keyword's relevance in relation to a user's search query." My question: What is the "Overall Keyword Quality" within Adwords? It's not something that they use for ranking. Is this just a round-about way of saying that they use these attributes to calculate the minimum bid, or is it referring to something else? It seems slightly redundant, if this paragraph is simply listing the factors that impact your minimum bids... Perhaps I'm just paranoid...
What do you mean by overall keyword quality? From what I observe, this is the minimum bid for each quality score. Good - $0.04 average OK - $0.1-$0.2 Poor - $0.5-$5
That's how I read it the first time, but why not just say "For defining minimum CPC bid requirements, your Quality Score evaluates your keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) and the relevance of the keyword, your ad's text, and landing page." It seems a little redundant if the minimum CPC bid requirements and the overall quality score are the same thing. Then again, if the OQS is just a number, that's then grouped into minimum bids, then it makes some sort of sense. It just seems like quite a grandiose name, given that the minimum bids are completely irrelevant in every campaign that I have...
They are not the same thing - the point is that min CPC is calculated only using overall quality score (inversally proporcional). The quality Score (excluding site quality Score) is still one of the 2 factors (along with max cpc) that defines your ad position - so if your keyword already has an affordable min CPC, you should still concern with your quality score so you can get a better position (more traffic) and a lower average cpc.
But it's a different Quality Score. The minimum bid quality score is not used to calculate your position, that's the other one. Does the 'Overall Quality Score' get used for anything other than setting the minimum bids?