I thought that this would be a wonderful post regarding improving quality scores in adwords. One of the common problems allot of people are facing is that there CPC clicks are way to high to compete with the big boys in the market. The truth is that Google is all about relevency and that there is actually one price for company A and another price for company B based on quality score of the adverts and relevency. I am trying to test what works and what doesn't. I wanted to see whay everyones thoughts were on privacy policies existing on the landing pages? do they count to the QC?
QS is mainly about first your keyword relevancy (don't use "dog food" as a keyword for a page selling something else) and then your click rate. Your CTR is about 65% of the QS and relevancy about 25%. There MAY be a small weight for having a privacy policy in the 10% left over. Whether there is or not, it's a good idea to have one but it won't make a big or even a noticeable dent in your QS. See Adwords FAQ for longer explanation.
What is considered to be a good CTR? I've read that an average CTR is 2%. Most of my ads have 5% or more, my most successful had 14%! Even this ad with a high CTR and really targeted keyword had Quality Score 7/10. Why? Is it even possible to get Quality Score 10/10? It happened to me only once. I was really surprised.
There's no such thing as an average, good or bad CTR. Look at your QS instead. It tells you how you compare to competitors. That's the basic definition of QS. My standard answer to why you have a certain QS is because your CTR, compared to the historical average, warrants getting it. Therefore, while you consider a 14% CTR very good (is this in the top positions?), the QS tells you that historically, others have done better. Not that a QS of 7 is bad (the average may be 5 by definition). Note that QS is normalized by position and you may be closer to an 8 than you think because behind the scenes, it's calculated to many decimal places and it might actually be 7.45. Just a few more points and it will be 8, assuming rounding up.