Google’s Quality Score is a grading system that judges your ads and gives you a “score” between 1 and 10. Having a good Quality Score is essential to a successful Google Ads (AdWords) campaign because it determines the amount you pay per click (PPC) and the frequency at which your ad appears.
Google does this because, well, they care – sorta. I mean, despite the grandeur of their presence in so many facets of our lives, they are still a search engine. They ultimately want to provide a better search result for the users of their search engine because they need to keep people coming back. Would you use a search engine that didn’t give you the results you wanted? Didn’t think so – back to QS.
Google’s quality rating has a powerful influence over the cost-effectiveness of your paid search campaigns, making it essential to have a good Quality Score in Google Ads. Having a high Quality Score is a tremendous benefit to your Google advertising campaign, as it provides you with:
- Lower costs – Google rewards advertisers with high Quality Scores by lowering their cost per click (CPC), which can subsequently lower your cost per conversion.
- More exposure – When you have high Quality Scores, your ads will display more often and in better positions. You can get more exposure, more clicks, and more conversions without having to raise your bids.
Your Quality Score is determined by several factors:
- Relevance of ad copy to the keyword
- Relevance of the ad to its corresponding landing page
- The ad’s click-through rate (CTR)
- Historical account performance
- Other relevance and performance factors
A higher Quality Score equates to more impressions at lower costs, lowering your cost per click and cost per action.
Google
Having a high Quality Score is key, but it can often be difficult to manage the varying factors that contribute to Quality Score single handedly.
Learn how to improve your Google Ads quality score
As much as we’d like it to be the case, Google Ads isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it advertising platform. If you want to successfully reach the people in need of your product or service and deliver them a valuable marketing experience, you need to be proactive—and that means working hard to improve your Google Ads quality score.
So—how do you do it? In order to answer that question, we need to unpack the true meaning of Google Ads quality score. Don’t worry: Contrary to what you may believe based on all the discussion surrounding it, quality score is actually a pretty simple metric. Let’s dig into it.
Perhaps the most important thing to know about Google Ads quality score is that it’s a keyword-level metric. There’s no such thing as an account-level quality score or a campaign-level quality score. That being said, it’s totally fair game to calculate the average quality score across all the keywords in your Google Ads account.
Alright—so we’ve established that quality score pertains to keywords, but what does it say about your keywords? Basically, when Google Ads assigns a quality score to one of your keywords, that’s their way of telling you how relevant and helpful your ad is to the users its targeting. Because Google strives to serve the most relevant and helpful ads possible, an alternative way to think about quality score is as a measure of the likelihood that your ad will outperform the others that are targeting the same keyword. If your keyword has a quality score of 1, your chances of winning a top ad position are slim to none. If your keyword has a quality score of 10, you’re in awesome shape.
How to improve your Google Ads quality score
From a broad perspective, improving your Google Ads quality score is all about creating ads that match the intent behind the keywords you’re targeting and help users accomplish what they need to accomplish. So, if you’re targeting high-funnel keywords that signify intent to learn rather than intent to purchase, you should create ads that teach rather than sell.
Moving from the broad to the specific, let’s look at the individual signals Google Ads uses to determine the quality scores of your keywords. Spoiler alert: They’re all sort of connected.
- Keyword relevance: You can improve your Google Ads quality score by writing ads that closely match the intent behind the keywords they’re targeting. Building tight ad groups is a great way to make this easier on yourself.
- Landing page relevance: Another straightforward way to improve your Google Ads quality score is to create landing pages that match the intent behind the keywords they’re targeting and make it easy for your prospects to do what they need to do.
- Click-through rate: As a third tactic to improve your Google Ads quality score, focus on turning impressions into clicks at a higher rate. The best way to do this is to think carefully about what your prospects are trying to accomplish and shape your offers to match their goals.
You can’t improve your Google Ads quality scores until you know how you stack up. Contacting us is the easiest way to get a better grip of where your Quality Score lands and what can be done to improve specifically just for you.
