AdWords Quality Score, what does it tell you ?

Quality Score Google AdWords Unraveled

(Jan 2014) In 2013 Google changed the way they showed the QS in your AdWords Dashboard. (They did'nt change the way they calculated it,and/or used it internally, they just changed the number you get to see, and they cleaned up the additional information given when you hovered over the status.

It used to be quite confusing, one could have have 3 x AA status and have a QS of 10-9-8 or 7 !

But they cleaned it up, and the information given with the QS seems much more relevant.

Although improved, there are still some strange combinations, like the QS of 9 with only an Average score for Ad Relevance/CTR ! Or the QS of 3 with an Above Average score for Ad Relevance.

But all in all it looks more realistic to me.

With the new information, without to much overlap, it has become a pretty usefull "tool" to predict what your efforts to improve your QS, wil bring you.

We looked at over a dozen AdWords Accounts and 1000s of keywords and that gave us the following list for the shown info on the Quality Scores when hovered over the status " Eligible " :