With an intention to bring a little more transparency to Quality Score reporting, Google will shortly replace the existing default Quality Score of 6 with Null Quality Scores for all the new as well as low-activity keywords in Google AdWords.

In other words, the quality score reporting method or technique for Google AdWords is going to change now wherein null quality scores for new and inactive keywords will replace the present default quality score of 6, in order to make it more transparent.

Google AdWords In A Nutshell

Before getting into the technicalities of Google AdWords update, let’s discuss a bit about what exactly is Google AdWord and how important are quality scores. Google AdWords is nothing but a highly significant online advertising service that makes it possible for an advertiser to exhibit a short advertising copy to web users and it is normally developed on the basis of predefined keywords and cookies. Generally, this advertising copy is linked to the web pages displayed in front of the users.

Significance Of Quality Scores To Advertisers

Now let’s try to understand what are quality scores and how crucial they are for advertisers. Quality scores are allotted to the keywords contained in the pay-per-click ads or PPC ads on the basis of their relevance to the content of the landing page. The more relevant your keyword is to the landing page content the higher score will be allotted to it. Now what’s interesting here is the advertisers have to pay lesser money for those ads which contain high score keywords.

Hence the kind of quality scores the keyword fetches remains extremely important for advertisers when it comes to allocating budget for the Pay Per Click ads.

Google Had Started Assigning A Quality Score Of 6 To Keywords in 2015

In the year 2015, Google had changed the way it used to report quality scores for keywords in AdWords, and that is when it had started assigning a default quality score of 6 for all the new keywords.

At that time the company had said that the change will not affect ad auction or the way quality scores are measured or calculated. That means the change had nothing to do with anything apart from the numbers displayed in AdWords. In addition to that, Google had also mentioned that the implementation of this change will help in simplifying some of their core systems, which will eventually allow them to focus on how to enhance the reporting accuracy for keywords containing traffic.

The Latest Change Will Be Implemented From Sept. 12, 2016

The change in the quality score reporting methodology will be implemented by September 12, 2016, wherein all the latest keywords along with the keywords which have not obtained clicks as well as impressions recently will be assigned null quality scores. The null quality scores will be shown with dashes or (“–“).

It looks like the latest update will surely change a whole lot of things when it comes to quality scores reporting in Google AdWords.