Is Google Adwords Quality Score Exaggerated?

PPC Management companies are always talking about it, always fearing it and always wondering what the next change will be.  Of course, I am referring to Google Adwords Quality Score.  Advertisers may very well be starting to see Google Adwords as a rival instead of a profitable advertising platform.

To sum it up, Google Adwords Quality Scored is mainly based off of the relevancy between your keywords, ad groups, text ads, landing page quality and load time, historical click through rate and overall account history.  Every advertiser will have their own success rates and opinions on quality score, but I truly believe that overall account history is the prime factor.

I read an interesting and I may even call it a brave article written by guest blogger, Shawn Livengood, on ppchero.com.

In the article, Livengood refers to Google’s Quality Score as “overhyped” and claims that “the reality is that if you’re running a relevant, well organized PPC campaign, you shouldn’t even have to think about your quality score.”

Livengood also claims that his theory on Google’s Quality Score is that “it’s slightly comforting to get a “grade” on how you’re doing in your AdWords account.  With so many different numbers and statistics flying around in your account, it’s easy to focus on one specific number to determine how things are going.  The only real “score” you need is one (or all) of these three: total conversions, conversion rate, and cost per conversion.”

Livengood is basically stating that if people want your product or service and you are targeting them appropriately, then you’ll convert them.  If people don’t find what they are looking for, then they’re simply not going to convert.

I think that Livengood makes a valid point, conversions don’t lie, but in today’s world competition is more fierce than ever.  Whether we like it or not, we are not going to get our ads ranking with our competitors if Google is ranking us in the “poor” category.  I found it a bit contradictory that Livengood praised a strong, well-structured, relevant pay per click campaign, yet also stated that Quality Score is “overhyped”.

In my experience, the only times I have seen an online marketing campaigns perform with success that have not been structured around Google’s Quality Score are when the campaigns have so much history that it almost seems to wipe everything else out completely. I feel as if you can put together a beautifully structured and relevant campaign, but click history is the element that is missing in new campaigns and the piece of the Quality Score puzzle that we strive for to complete the package.