Brad Geddes reports that Google has updated their AdWords Quality Score to now include geographic information in the quality score algorithm.

If you take a look at the Google page on the Quality Score, you will see a line that reads:

Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown.

As Brad notes, this geographic level detail is on the account level, not on the campaign level. So if you have an account targeting multiple geographic locations and you break those out by campaign, it won’t make a difference on the campaign level. Brad hopes Google moves this to a more granular level, i.e. on the campaign level – where many SEMs place their geo-specific targeting options.

Geographic information is not 100% new to Google’s quality score. Google does use it for your page load time score, which is part of the overall quality score. But it was not used outside of that, until now.

I did not see an official blog post from the AdWords blog yet.

Related Topics: Google: AdWords

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz