Changes to quality score in AdWords scripts

We are making some changes to the way AdWords scripts returns quality score data for keywords.

We will return a null quality score for keywords that don’t have enough impressions and clicks to determine a Quality Score, such as new keywords or old ones that haven't served a long time. This will impact your scripts in two ways:
  • Reports: Starting with version v201607, the Critieria Performance and Keywords Performance reports will return a quality score of “--” for these keywords. Past versions (v201605 and earlier) of these reports will remain unchanged.
  • getQualityScore method: Starting the week of Sep 12, 2016, the getQualityScore method of the Keyword entity will return NULL score for these keywords instead of a numeric value.
If you use use quality score information in your script, please make sure you update it to work with the new changes.

Filtering on quality score

Filtering on quality score will work as follows:
  • If no filtering conditions are specified on the QualityScore field, all matching keywords are returned, including those with NULL quality score.
  • If numerical filtering conditions are specified on the QualityScore field, keywords with NULL quality score information are excluded automatically. For example, QualityScore <= 6 will include keywords with quality score from 1 to 6 but exclude keywords with NULL quality score.
  • To retrieve keywords with NULL quality score, filter using the condition HasQualityScore = FALSE.
  • To retrieve keywords with NULL quality score along with keywords with specific quality scores, you need to run two separate reports and combine the results locally.
If you have any questions about these changes or AdWords scripts in general, you can post them on our developer forum.

Anash P. Oommen, AdWords Scripts Team