AdWords recently released a Health Score feature that ‘grades’ your account, but is it just a rip-off of an existing free performance grader? Columnist Larry Kim compares.

Here’s a crazy new idea: Imagine a tool that analyzes your AdWords account and grades you based on your performance.

OK, it’s not so crazy. Or new.

My company, WordStream, has provided a free AdWords Performance Grader for over five years now.

But here’s what is new: A feature is now available in some (not all) AdWords accounts called an AdWords Account Health Score. The new feature was first spotted by Chris Whyatt at Receptional and subsequently written up by Ginny Marvin for Search Engine Land.

A lot of people on Twitter have been asking me: How is AdWords’ own health score different from WordStream’s performance grader?

Let’s take a look.

Your Google AdWords Health Score: What is it?

The AdWords Health Score is a feature adoption checklist for select campaigns in an account. The campaign/account score is based on how many of the recommendations you complete.

As the screen shot above illustrates, these 14 recommendations include:

• Add callout extensions;
• Use conversion tracking;
• Add negative keywords;
• Add sitelink extensions;
• Show ads on Google search partners; and
• Use a recommended daily budget

So Google’s health evaluation is based on how much you’re leveraging the AdWords platform features. Every time you implement one of those features, your score goes up by a few percentage points.

Does getting to 100 percent make you a winner?

The account health score is a great way for Google to increase awareness or remind advertisers about all the awesome features the robust AdWords platform provides. This health score might even encourage greater adoption of those features.

How WordStream’s Grader scores accounts

WordStream’s definition of AdWords health is different from Google’s.

What we’re doing is comparing your account performance (click-through rates, Quality Scores and so on) to other similar accounts out there, based on your spend range, industry, sub-industry and location.

Here’s an example of our Quality Score Optimization comparison:

In this case, Ben Malkin at Razor Creations is doing an absolutely killer job at optimizing CTR (click-through rate) and Quality Scores for his industry/location. The 99-percent grade is a percentile score. He’s the unicorn in a sea of donkeys.

The WordStream AdWords Grader is less about what you are (or are not) doing, but how you are doing.

That is the key difference.

One score (WordStream’s) provides context to advertisers. The other score (AdWords’) is a best-practice check.

Conclusion

Is Google’s Health Score a rip-off of WordStream’s Performance Grader, as suggested in various stories? Not based on our review.

The only similarity between what Google is testing and what we’ve provided to our clients for years is that we’re scoring advertisers. That’s it.

The way we generate our grades is quite different from how Google generates their scores.