Every keyword in your Google AdWords account has associated with it a Quality Score. The Quality Score is a way to tell whether a keyword is relevant to the ad itself, and relevant to search queries. There are many factors that go into an individual keyword’s Quality Score. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the higher the position where your keyword will trigger ads, and the lower that keyword’s associated cost-per-click. Therefore, you want your keywords’ Quality Scores to be as high as possible.
The overall Google Network is made up of the Search Network and the Content Network. Your ads will appear on the Search Network if you have so chosen this in your campaign settings. In these cases, the user’s search query words determine where the ads are targeted. These are the ads that show up in a column next to search engine results, like the ones seen in the screen shot. The higher the keywords’ Quality Scores, the higher ads show up in these columns.
As for the Content Network, the eligibility of your ad to show up on a particular content site, and its location on that site are determined by your keyword’s Quality Score for content, which is based on past performance of your ad on this site, and on similar sites. The Quality Score for Content is also based on relevance to the keywords and those of the ad group on this site.
Using the Google Keyword Tool, and optimizing your ads so that they are highly keyword-specific will help boost your keywords’ Quality Scores.
