Dana, these advanced PPC "truths" are quite revealing to me as well. Like you, I come from the organic side of search. But PPC is truly fascinating, and need to find time to really dig deep into some internal testing.

Yes QS is that fuzzy undefined black box. I could not have said it better. In fact I read in this same report that although the relevancy of the landing page is a factor for quality score, it is NOT a factor for the QS determining Ad Rank. How's that for fuzzy?

I like how Webmaster T called the QS the "fuzzy black box". It's true. No one really knows how Google calculates QS. And how they calculate it makes no sense.

I've had campaigns where the campaign is optimized to the hilt according to Google's standards and still some keywords would average at 4/10 or 5/10 QS. While other campaigns where it wasn't possible to fully optimize the campaign (ie. client couldn't host custom landing page), and those keywords averaged at 7/10 or 8/10 QS.

I miss the good old days where PPC campaigns were actually profitable.

Quality Scores of 1 could result in paying up to 600% more for each click. Glad you shared the chart, an eye-opener for those of us who don't spend as much time on the PPC side of the house.

This shows the importance of focused efforts.