Ad Quality Monitoring and Best Practices

Monitoring Your Quality Score

Due to the dynamic nature of the Internet, your keywords' Quality Scores can fluctuate often. Therefore, it's a good idea to monitor your performance and make adjustments as needed.

To analyze your account performance quickly, use the following resources:

• Keyword diagnosis: To view the Quality Score for a single keyword, hover over the speech bubble icon next to the keyword's status in the Keywords tab. A help bubble will appear with information about the keyword and the Quality Score. You may see one of the following statuses for each keyword:

   Eligible: These keywords are eligible to trigger ads.

   Disapproved: These keywords don't comply with our Editorial Guidelines or Content Policy and won't trigger ads until you correct the problem.

   Paused/Deleted: These are keywords you've paused or deleted. They won't enter the ad auction and therefore won't trigger your ads.

   Low search volume: These keywords are suspended because they're associated with very little search traffic on Google properties. They'll be reactivated if we find they could start delivering traffic. 

   Below first page bid: These keywords' bids are below the first page bid estimate, meaning that they likely aren't triggering ads on the first page of search results. The first page bid estimate will show as long as your keyword exceeds a minimum Quality Score threshold.

   Low Quality Score: These keywords have very low Quality Scores, which means they're not likely to trigger ads.

To learn how to enable a keyword that isn't running, visit the keyword statustroubleshooting topic.

• Quality Score column: Enable the Quality Score column to view a list of Quality Scores for your keywords. On the Keywords tab, click the Columns button at the top of your statistics table, and select "Customize columns" from the drop-down. Select the "Qual. score" column. Click Save. Each keyword's Quality Score will appear in your stats table.
• CTR column: View the "CTR" column on your ad group tab or campaigns tab to see how well an ad group or campaign is performing. The higher the click-through rate (CTR), the better the ad group or campaign is probably doing.

On the ad group level, CTR is broken out in rows by search and the Display Network. In general, a CTR over 1% on Google is very good.

CTR on the Display Network is typically much lower and is relative based on the Display Network placement. For example, if the average CTR for an ad on a particular website is 0.01%, but the CTR for your ad on that site is 0.05%, you're doing great.

For more in-depth performance tracking, we suggest that you set up conversion tracking or google analytics.