It’s not just about control… It’s about Quality!

I pretty much had this post written before the announcement came out today about Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns. And much of what is written maintains its importance still. Some of it becomes even more important because, from everything I have read and studied, location targeting seems to be one of the few things still left within our control to breakout into separate campaigns. This should make you want to do that even more.

Google says there are 9 things which go into Quality Score:

• Your keywords past click-through rate (CTR)
• Your display URL’s past CTR
• Your account history (read overall CTR of account)
• Quality of your landing page (relevance to search query)
• How relevant your keyword is to your ads
• How relevant your keyword is to what a user searches for
• Geographic Performance
• Performance by device for your ads – You have a different QS per device
• If Targeting the GDN your performance by site
• Those all come straight from the Google AdWords support site.

Did you catch the one in Bold? Performance (or expected performance for new keywords/campaigns) by geography is one of the factors that goes into the Quality Score of each keyword. But it wasn’t till recently i realized just how big of a factor that could be.