What is Google Adsense Quality Score?

In last week's comment, I talked about the power of AdSense forums. I could have said the same thing about all of the blogs dealing with AdSense too. There are plenty of those and they're stuffed with great information from people on the cutting edge of AdSense techniques.

The most important of these is probably AdSense's own blog.

That's always worth keeping an eye on. It's where any changes are likely to be announced, it's where you can pick up a few tips straight from the horse's mouth... and it's where you can sometimes get a behind the scenes view of how Google chooses the ads you get on your site.

That's really the big mystery of AdSense. Sure, we can play around with the keywords on the page and we can block ads that we don't want to display but that's about it. When we open our own web pages, we've really got no idea whether we're going to see ads for dried mangoes or for air tickets to Burkina Faso.

The latest entry at the AdSense Blog reveals a little about how ads are ranked and mentions a term that I doubt many people are family with: an ad's Quality Score.

According to Google, "Quality Score is determined by your [the AdWords advertiser's] keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR), relevance of your ad text, historical keyword performance, the quality of your ad's landing page, and other relevancy factors."

That's a whole bunch of different factors and like many of the things considered by Google, we don't know any of them as they relate to a particular ad (and neither do the AdWords advertisers).

What strikes me about this definition though isn't the relevance of ad text or historical keyword performance. If an ad isn't relevant or is dedicated to a poor-performing keyword, I don't want it.

It's the fact that Google also rates the quality of the ad's landing page.

I've got no idea how they measure that. What Google might consider a poor landing page someone else might think of as a good one.

As a publisher, I can pretty much let that ride. But I also have to drive traffic to my sites and if I'm using AdWords, it's just one more reason to make sure that my site looks the part.

Maybe that's Google's bonus contribution to the Internet: an incentive to increase the quality of Web pages. I just wish I knew Google's idea of quality.