Everyone knows how important Quality Scores are to an AdWords campaign that delivers decent ROI. Or at least I think they do! If you don’t, give me a shout and I’ll write an article that explains it.
But how do you go about tracking whether you’re actually making improvements to those Quality Scores? Let’s face it, on all but the most basic of campaigns you’re going to have multiple ad groups, and multiple keywords within those ad groups, and each keyword has its own individual quality score. This means that if you don’t look into the detail, you could find yourself thinking that an ad campaign is not delivering, when in fact some of the key phrases within the campaign are delivering solid ROI.
The most annoying thing is that Google doesn’t keep historical Quality Scores in accounts. What we need is some sort of tracker that will show us changes on a keyword, ad group and campaign level, over time. I decided to have a look to see how this could be achieved, and this is what I found.
PPC Ephiphany Script
You can find the post with the link to the script here: https://www.ppc-epiphany.com/2016/03/11/introducing-the-quality-score-tracker-v3-0/
This is a great free script that gets uploaded into your AdWords account, and extracts the QS values into your Google Drive in the form of a dashboard and a detailed spreadsheet.
I found the setup to be easy and quick following their instructions, and the resulting spreadsheets are clear. I’ve set up the script to run daily, so it should build up a nice profile of performance over time.
Basic, but great, and free.
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Adalysis
Go here for their tool: https://adalysis.com/quality-score/
Adalysis have an interesting breakdown of the 3 factors that affect the Quality Score, and the weightings that are given to them depending on your current performance, in terms of being above average, average or below average.
You sign in with your Google account for a 14 day free trial. Once you’ve linked everything, their system extracts the data from AdWords, and then they send you an email to tell you everything’s set up.
The basic package is $99.
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Supermetrics
Try it here: http://try.supermetrics.com/adwords-historical-quality-score/
This is a plugin to Google Sheets that gives you the ability to pull all sorts of information out of all sorts of systems. It looks like a really powerful tool, but we’re interested in Quality Score here, so that’s what I’ve tried.
It’s a bit more techie than the previous script. You have to build up the query that you want to run yourself, which isn’t immediately obvious. I ended up with just getting three rows of data the first time I tried, but with a bit of fiddling I could get it working. But it was all a bit painful.
At the bottom of the sidebar is a template gallery, and this was a lot more impressive. There are some useful templates straight out of the box, which worked perfectly.
However, I can’t see how I can track specific keywords and ad group performance over time. It seems to be more of a snapshot view rather than helping me prove we’re doing badly or well over time. I just can’t see that it’s showing me the data I want to see.
I expect I could build what I need over time, and the other integrations are interesting, but ultimately it doesn’t quite do what I’m after, and it’s also $45 or so per month after the trial, so it needs to be hitting the spot.
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Optmyzr.com
Go here: http://www.optmyzr.com/info/quality_score_tracker
Optmyzr’s toolset gives you all sorts of information about your campaigns over time, but again we’re only really interested in Quality Score for the purposes of this post.
The visualisations you get are nice. An overview for example:
You can drill into the campaign, to show changes to keywords over time, which is what we’re after. At the moment there’s no data, so I’ll come back and update this in a few days.
This is a comprehensive suite of tools, and it’s priced to match. The regular is $249 per month, and the pro is $499 per month. So it’s only going to be worth it if you’re after a lot more than just the historical Quality Score tracking. But it’s a nice solution. They do have a lite plan, but you have to contact them for information.
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