When you log into your AdWords account today, you might spot something different: Google have finally allowed us to see the 'quality score' of each of our keywords.

What's Quality Score?

It used to be that your AdWords ad placement was affected by two things: 1) historical clickthrough rate (CTR) & 2) maximum bid. Then Google switched things around & introduced the 'Quality Score' system. We were told that CTR, ad relevance, keyword relevance & the landing page were all part of this, but that's all we knew.For the last year or so, that has meant that we've been partially blind to the factors affecting our ad ranking & the results of any changes we made to those factors. Showing the Quality Score doesn't totally fix that, but it at least means we can see a little better.

I can't see my Quality Score? What do I do?

If your Quality Score column hasn't been activated automatically, go to any keyword listing in your AdWords account & click the 'customize columns' link at the top of the page. Select 'Show Quality Score'.

What's Good About It?

1. Any extra information & transparency around Quality Score has to be a good thing
2. You can now quickly see whether changes in your ads are affecting your Quality Score (before, you could only really judge effects on costs & conversion)
3. If you're managing thousands of keywords, this can act as a simple way of flagging broken/404 landing pages
4. Before, when your keywords went inactive & you were told 'Raise your bid or improve your Quality Score', you had no way of knowing whether working on your Quality Score really would have any effect. Now, if you're a 'Poor', you know you at least have a chance to do something other than just shell out more money.
5. If your ad is converting great, but costing you a lot. you can now A/B test your ad/landing page with the objective of moving from an 'OK' to a 'Great' quality score & reduce those costs.
6. There are often complaints that Google is rewarding the advertisers with the most money. This is one step back toward a level playing field; rewarding effort, intelligence & customer focus, rather than just money.

What's Bad?

1. Some of the Quality Score ratings seem somewhat arbitrary - very similar keywords pointing to the same landing page are showing different scores, though there are only a couple of handfuls of examples of this in my account.
2. It seems the Quality Score algorithm itself has been updated, with many new minimum bid amounts popping up. Keyword misspellings in particular seem to have suffered here.

What's Ugly?

1. With only three possible status results ('Poor', 'OK' & 'Great' - almost a traffic light system), this doesn't feel the most scientific
2. Quality Score hasn't been added to the 'reports' centre yet (at least not in my account), so gathering a report of all my 'Poor' keywords isn't as easy as it could be.