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What’s your Quality Score—a metric Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and Bing use that influences your ad rank and SEM cost-per-click—right now? For those already in the know about this, do you spend a lot of time trying to fine-tune every detail so you can maximize it?

There’s something to be said for optimizing your Quality Score, but it’s not the end of the world if you don’t perfect it. Let us explain why:

1. Technically, It’s Not a Score Out of 10

Quality Score really tries to predict your click-through rate, measuring criteria such as ad copy, landing page experience, optimization, and your current click-through rate.

While you can thus learn how well you score overall regarding these factors, that won’t guarantee your true ad performance.

2. Google Itself Sometimes Doesn’t Understand Quality Score

On one disastrous occasion many years ago, every keyword saw its quality score fall to 3 or less.

Google reported:

“The issue appears that the Quality Scores of the keywords in the actual auction are not being affected, but the way they are being reported in the interface is incorrect.”

What this means is that the actual Quality Score and the reported score are two different things, explaining why keywords with a good click-through rate can have poor quality scores.

3. You Don’t Control Quality Score

If one thing from this post is now crystal clear, it’s that you have no control over your Quality Score. You won’t always know why you have the score you do, and neither does Google.

When you earn a high Quality Score, you might get a lower cost-per-click—but even that isn’t always precise.

4. Profitability Counts More

At the end of the day, this is what any search marketing campaign is about, isn’t it? So, if you see good margins from keywords with average Quality Scores, why worry?

You can adjust and test a little to see if you can reduce your costs. Yet, so long as you’re profitable, that’s what counts.

5. There are Many Other Factors to Worry about with PPC

Quality Score is just one of many things you should concern yourself with. For example, you must also keep in mind location targeting, device modifiers, cost per conversion, conversion rate, and net margins. With more important metrics related to your profitability at play, Quality Score shouldn’t represent your sole or primary focus.

Wrapping Up

It takes many hours to optimize your Quality Score: hours you could instead spend fine-tuning other aspects of your PPC campaign. Remember that and act accordingly!