What is Impression Weighted Average Quality Score?

Achieving healthy Quality Score is crucial to success in Google Ads optimization. Higher quality scores mean a lower bid requirement for clicks at higher ad positions, driving more visibility and more sales.

Keeping a close look on your quality scores can be tricky. Google Ads does not provide an account level quality score metric. So to judge the health of keyword quality scores across your campaigns is the problem. But you can easily create this metric yourself using a simple formula.

1. Export all of your keywords, their quality scores, and their impressions into a spreadsheet.
2. For each keyword, multiply its impressions by its quality score (if the quality score is unavailable, multiply by 6).
3. Now add up all of the resulting values and divide by the total amount of impressions to find your Impression Weighted Average Quality Score, or ‘IWQS’.

If your IWQS is 9/10 or higher, your campaigns are probably focused only on low hanging fruits such as brand terms, and you should test a broader range of keywords to find new revenue streams.

A healthy google ads account with a range of highly optimized and newly added keywords tends to have an IWQS of between 6 and 8.

If your IWQS dips below 4, that’s a sign that you should work on optimizing your existing campaigns before growing them further.