DISQUS

The ClickEquations Blog: The Economics of Quality Score

  • Alan Perkins · 9 months ago
    Nice article.

    However, QS is *reported* as an integer but is probably *stored* as a floating point number. An increase in reported QS from 7 to 8 could actually mean an increase from 7.49 to 7.5 (i.e. almost nothing) or, at the other extreme, from 6.5 to 8.49 (i.e. nearly 2).

    It's unlikely that a one point change in reported QS would map to a one point change in real QS. Your numbers map to real QS, but we don't get to see that.

    Interesting nonetheless. The potential of changing QS has been demonstrated. Thanks.
  • Craig Danuloff · 9 months ago
    Thanks Alan - You are exactly right, or at least I assume you are - I don't know that Google has every confirmed that QS is internally calculated to more levels of precision, but we assumed that as with PageRank that is true. Didn't think to express that in the tables.

    My guess is that by watching carefully we can see if in fact there are steps between the levels. Thanks again for bringing this up.
  • AndyBeard · 9 months ago
    Quality Score also doesn't have to be linear and Google often present things in a much more simplistic way than they are actually calculated.
  • Chris · 9 months ago
    This is amazing insight -- thanks for taking the time and having the genius to come up with these hard numbers!
  • Claire Jarrett · 9 months ago
    Incredibly useful article, many thanks for this.
  • mbaguru · 5 months ago
    I totally agree with your point in which you have mentioned that quality score is not an integer rather a real number because I have seen in my adwords campaign that the same keyword in different ad group with same Quality Score have different FPBE.

    So this thing proves that QS 7 doesn't mean only 7, it has something inside it due to which the FPBE is different for the same keyword in different ad group.
  • Maggie · 2 months ago
    Great use of charts to demonstrate the economic benefits of a higher quality score!
  • Magnus Nilsson · 2 months ago
    Great post, agree calcs probably aren't precisely accurate but still a very good indication to understand the correlation of qs and cpc penalty.