Online Marketing - Marketing Don

Adwords Editor Affects Quality Score In Different Ways

Have you been updating your adwords account using adwords editior?  Your quality score will be affected.

I asked Google how quality score is affected when I completed a website url re-write and changed the urls in my account using the editor.  Their reply is below:

To answer these briefly, whenever you post changes with AdWords Editor, even bulk changes, the upload will update (not delete) all of the keywords, ad groups, and campaigns in your account. The impact is no different than manually makes the changes in the account. Your Quality Score, as it is based on historic data, is largely unaffected. However, updating keyword destination URLs will cause our system to recalibrate the relevancy aspect of Quality Score: how relevant the keyword is to the ad text and to the new landing page. Given that historic statistics such as CTR are unaffected, the shift in Quality Score is minimal and frequently very short lived.That being said, ad texts are the one exception to this. Whenever you make a change to an ad text, whether the change is made from the online interface or AdWords Editor, the old ad text is deleted and a new one created in its place. The historic information associated with the ad text is lost. Quality Score will take a momentary hit, but frequently rebounds very quickly assuming that the content of the ad and landing page are not dramatically altered.

It sounds like, if you need to update your urls, your quality score will be minimally affected.  However, changes to your ad text is treated differently.  When you change your adtext you are essentially creating a new ad in Google’s eyes so you will have to start over and potentially take a hit on quality score.  With this in mind, try to change adtext only when necessary.  You may be better off pausing the ad and creating a new one so you always have the option to restart the old ad again and go back ot the old quality score.