Adwords Quality Score or Personal Credit History?

A good credit history always helps in life. When you buy a house, you get better mortgage rates, you want to get a lease for the new BMW, first they will check your credit history. Google started caring about the age of the sites for some time now, as we all know. Google thinks the websites are like good wine. When it gets older, it gets better. Now, the same thing is happening with Google Adwords Quality Score.

Amit from SuperAffiliateMindset had a post yesterday about the affect of the age of your Adwords account to the quality scores you will get for your campaigns. I have figured this out by myself almost a month ago. I was trying a new campaign with a brand new account, and all the quality scores became Poor, and OK after a few hours. When I have paused the campaign and started the same one at my old adwords account, all QS’s went to GREAT right away, and stayed there.

The important question is:

Is the age of your Google Adwords Account only criteria to get great QS?

It’s just like personal credit history, older the better. Let’s compare 2 person’s credit histories. Both have the same credit card for 10 years, but first person pays it all every month before the due date, and the second one is always late on payments, goes over his limit. Who will get a better credit history?

Therefore, there are many factors considered when assigning quality scores for your campaigns. Basically, Google assigns a credit history score for your adwords account. Here are a few factors that I strongly believe are used to determine the quality of a Google Adwords Account:

• Age of the account.
• Your average monthly spending.
• Your average CTR’s (Click Through Rates)
• Number of inactive keywords accountwide
• Number of unapproved ads

For brand new accounts, I don’t believe you will be penalized for a long time before getting great QS’s. It doesn’t make sense to scare new advertisers businesswise.

So, if you want to try/test new campaigns I’d highly recommend using a test account instead of your main account. It might hurt your Google Adwords overall QS’s, and increase your overall cost.