Quality Score for Google Ads – What is it and how can it be improved?

“Quality Score is an estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. Higher quality ads can lead to lower prices and better ad positions. Keywords, landing pages and the relevancy between them is what Google is taken into account.” (Source: Google Support)

When you advertise on Google you will want to take the right  actions to optimize your ads–your Quality Score is a central part of this process.

Google uses a scale of 1 to 10 when grading your ads. Unfortunately, there is no exact “recipe” to follow. In other words, nobody knows what exactly determines a good Google Ads Quality Score. What we do know for sure is that ads, keywords, landing pages and the relevancy amongst them is taken into account. Advertisers can find the score of their ads in the “Quality Score” column in the Google Ads report.

• Clever tip: check here Google Ads best practices.

Elements that may factor into your Google Quality Score:

• Your CTR or Click-through rate: number of clicks a link gets relative to its number of impressions.
• The relevance of each keyword to your ad group.
• The quality and relevance of the landing page.
• The relevance of your ad text.
• The historical performance of your Google Ads account.

Google Ads Quality Score – Why is it so important?

Quality Score affects the cost per click and cost per conversion of your ads. Therefore, it affects your ROI and the ranking of your ads. The higher your ad is placed, the better its performance will be. If you don’t want your ad to get lost in Google’s second or third results page, then your Quality Score is something you should monitor carefully and work on improving.

Leveraging our expertise in PPC and Google Ads advertising, we know that the Quality Score has a direct correlation to the success of your Google Ads and Microsoft Ads campaigns. When we improve the Quality Score, we see a positive impact on our return on investment (ROI).

HIGHER QUALITY SCORE = LOWER COST PER CONVERSION

Attention! Cost per conversion is not the same as cost per click. It’s not how much you pay per click, but how much you pay when someone performs the action (conversion) you want, whether it’s a sale or signing up for your newsletter. 

Fortunately, high quality scores reduce both the cost per click and the cost per conversion.

In general, the higher your Quality Score in Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, the lower your cost per conversion. Remember that a good Quality Score is Google’s way of saying that your PPC ad meets the needs of your potential customers. The better it meets the potential customer’s needs, the less Google will charge you for the ad click.

Quality Score vs. Ad Rank

It’s relatively easy to confuse these two terms with each other. Just remember that Quality Score is the tool that Google Ads offers advertisers to improve their ads. On the other hand, Ad Rank determines the position of your ad in Google’s search results. Ad Rank is determined by these factors as laid out by Google:

“Bid amount, your auction-time ad quality (including expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience), the Ad Rank thresholds, the competitiveness of an auction, the context of the person’s search (for example, the person’s location, device, time of the search, the nature of the search terms, the other ads and search results that show on the page, and other user signals and attributes), and the expected impact of extensions and other ad formats.” (Source: Google)

How can you increase your Quality Score in Google Ads?

Unfortunately there is no 100% guaranteed method to increase your Quality Score. However, there are some key areas that you can focus on to improve your score:

Conduct a good keyword research 

Discover highly relevant keywords to add to your campaigns, including long-tail keyword opportunities–which can contribute a big chunk of your overall traffic. You can get new ideas with a good keyword planner like ours.

Group keywords 

A key to a high Quality Score is relevance. A successful strategy to achieve this is to group keywords in separate ad groups by their meaning. 

Create targeted ads with landing pages 

After organizing your keywords into their respective groups, you can create ads and landing pages that target them specifically. Apart from increasing your Quality Score, this strategy is recommended to better organize your Google Ads account and make your life easier.

 

 

Optimize landing pages

• Improve your page’s loading time in order to avoid high bounce rates from users abandoning your landing page.
• Be mindful of the way you’ve designed your ads and think about what the user expects when they arrive at your landing page. The content of your landing pages must be as relevant as possible when comparing it to the respective ad.
• Clever tip: try our Google Ads Audit tool!

Never forget that the optimization process is not a one-time thing. You’ll have to constantly monitor your ads, measure the results they bring you, compare numbers, make changes and repeat.

Refine your ad copy as much as possible.

Test the most targeted PPC ad copy for your individual ad groups. More effective ads get a higher CTR, one of the best ways to improve the quality score.

Add negative keywords 

Continually research, identify and exclude irrelevant search terms that are wasting your budget.

Conclusions

As you have seen, the quality score is mainly a relevance “thermometer” that helps improve the keyword quality score. It is a matter of structuring your PPC campaigns into well organized and small groups of keywords, as long as the previous research of keywords are of relevance and high quality. These aspects will allow you to target a higher quality audience that is more likely to be searching for your products.

When a Google ad has a low quality score, it is mainly the result of a disconnection between the keywords, ad groups and ad text, as well as the content of the website and landing pages. 

A high quality score is obtained naturally when one does several things right. For example, when a Google Ads account has its keywords well organized in groups, the ad texts are at their maximum potential, and the landing pages relate to the ads and web content.  You have to pay special attention to the relevance of your keywords!