Are AdWords advertisers about to get a lot more Quality Score reporting metrics?

A short-lived blog post indicates useful changes are coming to help advertisers analyze Quality Scores in their accounts.

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Quality Score reporting in the AdWords interface leaves much to be desired. Only the current Quality Score is available, and granular details are contained in individual pop-ups that make analysis cumbersome. That could be changing.

Avner Pinchover shared a blog post on the Israel version of the Inside AdWords blog with Search Engine Land that describes a series of new columns of Quality Score metrics coming to the AdWords UI. It was posted back on March 10 and seems to have received little attention. It was removed for some reason yesterday. (The archive can be found here.) It’s not clear if it was posted in any other markets. We’ve reached out to Google to ask why it was pulled and will update here if and when we receive any answers. That said, I am willing to bet we will see these updates in the near future. The date in one of the image files indicates this post has been in the works since at least December.

With the changes, advertisers could soon see a new section of Quality Score metrics available in their AdWords accounts. The update would include seven new data points for analysis.

Adwords Quality Score Reporting Columns

A new menu of Quality Score metrics

It would finally be possible to analyze and share quality score data for the three key Quality Score factors that is stuck in those hover-over pop-ups at each keyword.

  • Expected Click-through Rate
  • Ad Relevance
  • Landing Page Experience

Additionally, new historic metrics would show the last known score in the selected date range (as far back as January 2016).

  • Quality Score (Historic)
  • Ad Relevance (Historic)
  • Landing Page Experience (Historic)
  • Expected Click-through Rate (Historic)

Advertisers could segment keyword reports by day to analyze end-of-day quality score data. In the example from the blog post below, the 3/10 Qual. score is the current score, and the Qual. score (hist.) column first shows the last known Quality Score for the reporting period and the historical score for each day in the reporting period. The reports show an empty Quality Score when there is not enough impression and click data.Adwords Historical Quality Score Daily Reporting

According to the blog post, the Quality Score columns would also be available at the manager account (MCC) level — if and when this goes live, that is. It would mark a significant change in the level of data Google provides and would make it possible to analyze Quality Score trends.

Google made this data available via the AdWords API last March. Check out Brad Geddes’ post from that time for thoughts on how to start thinking about using this data.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Ginny Marvin
Contributor
Ginny Marvin was Third Door Media’s former Editor-in-Chief (October 2018 to December 2020), running the day-to-day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin wrote about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, MarTech and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

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