Can Account-Level Quality Score Hurt Your AdWords Program If It Doesn’t Exist?

Let us open up with a debate.  Does an account level AdWords Quality Score (QS) really exist?  Or, to put broader brush strokes to it, does an ad group-level or campaign-level even exist?  This idea has been up for debate now for a while, and there are quite a few people who believe it exists, due to the fact that there is something that affects AdWord performance, but Google seems to deny the fact that it does.

According to Fred Vallaeys, a Search Engine Land columnist and a former Googler, said that Google doesn’t have an account-level QS metric.  Google itself even confirmed in its recent paper, “Settling the (Quality) Score,” that “there is no such thing as ad group-level, campaign-level or account-level Quality Score.”

Even with Google making this statement, this hasn’t totally calmed down those who believe there is a QS metric somewhere in AdWords.  To these people, if there isn’t an account-level QS in place, there seems to be something a lot like it affecting their performance.

According to Google’s whitepaper, “newly-launched keywords,” and the performance of “related keywords” matters.

“Instead of measuring new keywords from scratch, we start with info about related ads and landing pages you already have. If your related keywords, ads and landing pages are in good shape, we’ll probably continue to have a high opinion of them.”

In other words, For Google to predict the CTR of keywords, it would be keywords that don’t have any real history yet.  Naturally Google would have to use data from related terms in order to get the information on the new keywords.

In an article written on Search Engine Land by Mark Ballard, we will be walked through what the data for newly-launched keywords means, and what it tells us.  To find out, check out Mark’s post by following the link below!

Search Engine Land: If Account-Level Quality Score Doesn’t Exist, Can It Really Hurt Your AdWords Program?