JKE was right on the first one, wrong on the second. Having loads of adsense on there can result in a google slap - essentially google doesn't not like landing pages whose pages are designed primarily to make people click on adsense ads - they can be on there as a secondary consideration though. All of these are great tips - but the most important factor in getting a high QS is CTR - get a good CTR and get all these other elements right and you'll get a good QS
JHardy said: > All of these are great tips - but the most important factor in getting a high QS is CTR - get a good CTR and get all these other elements right and you'll get a good QS He's right. By far the most important factor is CTR. To expand, CTR at your position normalized among all other advertisers using the same keyword. In other words, if you have a QS of 10, you likely have an ad whose CTR is in the top 10% for that keyword. It doesn't matter if your CTR is 10% or 1%. Obviously if it's 1%, it means that all other advertisers have a CTR just as low (and lower) as you. I don't know the true percentages but they are likely as follows, based on my experience: QS = 10 = CTR better than 90% of your competitors (you're in the top 10%) QS = 9 = 80-90% QS = 8 = -70-80% QS = 7 = 60-70 you see the pattern, so QS = 1 = bottom 10%. Google recently has started calculating QS for each query so your QS can vary depending on competitors and what happens to their CTR. The QS algorithm is complex and is not infallible, it can make mistakes. If you doubt your score, contact Google. It generally seems to assign a lower QS on singular/plural if it doesn't see the exact keyword in your ad. For example, "red widget" would get a lower QS than "red widgets" if your ad uses the plural form. Of course, as I've said, it is complex and your competitors will affect your QS. But if that's the case and you want higher QS, put the singular keywords in their own group with a singular ad. If the QS is 7 or more, I don't usually bother, especially if more people use one form over another, as is usually the case. Plural forms in general are what people use most but each niche can be different. I don't know about having Adsense on your landing page. I'm guessing it has no effect. However, I have no clients using Adsense. The landing page portion of the QS calculation is at most 20% and probably half of that is the page's loading time. It's a good thing obviously to have the keyword on your landing page. But Google seems to use themes rather than actual keywords. You therefore don't have to have each keyword on your page and you don't have to create one page for each keyword as many suggest. I run campaigns where some keywords have a QS of 10 yet that keyword appears nowhere on the landing page. The theme will be similar however, "car parts" and "auto parts" or even "ford parts" for example. The page may mention only car parts but the other keywords may have decent QS. To me, as long as the QS is at least 7, I'm good with it, my ad is better than a large majority. Of course, I try to improve on this. But most times, a new keyword will get seven until there are enough impressions and it gets recalculated. If a new keyword gets less, the algo has found something it didn't like, a clue to figure out what and fix it. Google may show you 7, in integer number, but your actual QS as they calculate it may be 7.85 which is not so bad. However, you don't know this more precise number. Your only clue would be to download a QS report every day and put it in a database. Assuming no changes, if your QS goes down to 6 one day, it means you are at the lower edge of the scale and competitors are improving. If it goes up to 8, same thing but upper edge and competitors are getting worse (or some dropped out). You must assume however that competitors are always trying to improve so you must do the same. The easiest way is create ads that get better CTR. Hope this all helps.
I have around 800 keywords in my campaign, and 90% of those are 10/10 - the rest are 9s and 8s. With a bit of care, some decent research on keywords, it's easily achievable. My CTR for all keywords has a 12% average too.
That's some nice info there. I liked the point regarding where you have approximated QS with %ages. +repped
Quite a few of my keywords have reached the 10/10 status, but they are not my best performing keywords...I must say since I have implemented a sitemap, contact us page and articles page, my quality score has risen dramatically.
This isn't difficult to accomplish. A lot of has to do with how old the campaign is. The older the campaign, the better chance you have of getting a high QS.
All of my campaigns have between 50% and 95% of keywords with 10/10, even the new campaigns get the great scores. There is no secret to any of this relevance throughout and keep an eye on your ads to generate a high CTR. (Non of my sites use Adsense ad would think this may also help)