If you’ve read any of my blog posts about AdWords Quality Score (QS) or seen any of my presentations at SMX, SES, or PubCon, you should already be familiar with the importance of the AdWords account-level QS. It’s Google’s measure of how relevant the keywords in an account typically are and it’s a major factor in determining how much an advertiser has to pay to get new keywords started in their account.
An account with great account-level QS has to pay a lower CPC than if it had poor QS to get the same ad rank for a new keyword. As soon as the new keyword has enough CTR data to establish its relevance, the account-level QS factor becomes far less important.
The thing is that Google has never disclosed what the account’s QS is… until now! I just received a booklet from the Google Partners team with data for a few accounts that are under my MCC and while it’s so subtle I originally didn’t notice it, there is an account Quality Score published for each account!
So I immediately went to our Optmyzr Quality Score Tracker to see how Google’s numbers compare to the ones we’ve been calculating and reporting to our customers for nearly a year now. The good news is that they match up very closely. We are somewhat limited in how we can calculate the QS number but it seems our formula is pretty close to the one Google uses and for all accounts I checked, we were within 1 point of what Google said. Because Google rounds to an integer and their number is for the entire quarter, that’s as close as I think we could get.
