Does An Account Level Quality Score Exist In AdWords?
Google’s official comment is that Quality Score is only at the keyword level. In fact, in a PDF posted by Google entitled ‘Settling The (Quality) Score’, it states:
” There is no such thing as ad group-level, campaign-level or account-level Quality Score.”
That IS Google’s official stance and in most cases. However, as we all should know… Google measures EVERYTHING.
For instance, to become a certified Google Partner, Google measures the quality of an agency’s Client Center account (also called an MCC account) to determine a “Best Practice” score to see if we manage accounts in a manner at a level that shows expertise to become qualified as Google Partners. In this instance, Google uses a green bar scale but it could as easily be a scale of 1-10 as with keyword Quality Score. So, in a sense, the MCC accounts of agencies certainly have a type of “quality score”.
By the way, here is the “Best Practices” bar for Kinsey Street Online Marketing which ‘scores’ our AdWords management performance and customer care:
Yes, we are quite proud of how we scored but the main point of showing you that beautiful green bar is to show that there IS a score to an agency’s MCC account that houses all of their client AdWords accounts. And you are not going to be able to determine the best practice score of an MCC unless you score the quality of the AdWords accounts within that MCC. And you cannot score the accounts within unless you score the ad groups within those accounts and so on and so on.
So yes, there IS an account level quality score. Do they call it an “account level quality score”? No, but as Brother Billy Shakespeare once said:
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
So while Google might not call it an Account-level Quality Score, some type of score is certainly there and in fact, Google even alludes to this in the same document (linked above) which they proclaim there is no such thing as account-level Quality Score when they state that:
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.
So if Google doesn’t measure keywords from scratch but instead uses “info” from other elements of the account then how is Google developing this “high opinion” of the new keywords if quality scores are only at the keyword level? The answer is that Google’s system really doesn’t form an “opinion” – it is a computer algorithm after all so it bases these new keyword quality scores off of mathematical calculations, using scores to determine the quality of the other elements within the account. In other words, it is scoring the elements of the account to determine the quality scores of new keywords.
So, to use an obscure pop culture reference, “I’m not saying it was aliens. But aliens.” Or in this case, an account-level Quality Score.