Hi

Just started a adwords campaign and my score is 7/10

(ads havent started running yet)

I consider that pretty good..

Wondering if anyone here beat that? What's the highest you ever got?

Also how much of a difference did it make in the cost per click?

Thanks

10/10. If your QS will increase from 7 to 10 if your CTR is higher than 10% after your ads run.

If your CTR is lower than 10%, you QS may remain at 7 or decrease depends on your competitor CTR on the same keywords.

How QS affect your CPC & Ad Rank

Let say your QS is 7, your competitor QS is 10.
You bid $0.50, your competitor bid $0.36

Your Ad Rank = $0.5 * 7 = $3.5
Competitor Ad Rank = $0.36 * 10 = $3.6

Your competitor ads will rank higher than you, by paying less CPC. Meanwhile, he is getting more traffic for that the same set of keywords.

I got a 10 once. I had god onpage seo for the landing.
I could not get a 10 a second time.

10/10 for most of the keywords

Originally Posted by agag2

Just started a adwords campaign and my score is 7/10

A good start, especially if you are just starting out. However, when you create a new campaign, the system assigns a QS based on the information it has at the moment. It is a first pass. A second pass is evaluating your landing page. You can lose some points if there are issues on your LP. This will happen usually within the hour.

As others point out, it is possible to get a QS of 10. QS will determine your ranking along with your bid as well as how much you actually pay. The basic ranking formula is, as waimeng pointed out, is multiplying bid and QS.

Cost is calculated by taking the ranking of the advertiser below you and dividing by your QS. Therefore, the higher your QS the lower you pay, all else being equal.

The main factor in QS is your CTR. Unlike what waimeng said, it's not a fixed CTR. It's ridiculous and illogical to say you need a 10% CTR to get a QS of 10. It doesn't work that way.

CTR will be affected by your positioning: the higher you are, the higher your absolute CTR will be. QS is really a standard deviation calculation of how far away you are from the mean CTR for that keyword and normalized by position. In other words, your relative CTR. You can therefore have a QS of 10 at any position and for any CTR. I've had QS of 10 in first position with 2% CTR which means that most advertisers in that position averaged a lesser CTR. So don't think in absolute percentages, your QS tells you have well you are doing compared to others.

It is normal to get 10/10 QS, especially when you have a large account with several keywords. And as said above, there are no fixed CTR to achieve this. Keywords with QS of 10 does not implies more conversions though.

Currently here is one of my Campaigns:

10/10 - 961 keywords
9/10 - 107 keywords
8/10 - 68 keywords
7-10 - 1153 keywords
6/10 - 22 keywords
5/10 - 4 keywords
1/10-4/10 - 0 keywords

It use to be higher, but I've been focusing on learning SEO for the past few months. BTW i have a custom script that reports to me each day what my QS levels are so I didn't go in and count all of my keywords haha.