Everything You Need to Know about Quality Score on Google Ads
What Is Quality Score?
Quality score is a rating that shows the overall relevance of ads, keywords, and the landing page experience. It’s measured using a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best and 1 being the worst. It’s a general guide as to whether the ads are useful and relevant.
Why Quality Score Is Important and How It Is Calculated
Quality score is important because it’s a representation of how relevant your ads are to a user’s search query. Google is the most popular search engine and it wants to stay that way so the quality score helps them make sure the ads their users are seeing are relevant.
From an advertiser’s perspective, the quality score is also important because the metric determines if a keyword is eligible to enter an auction and if your ad will show for the query. Quality score with a CPC bid determines the rank. This is important for those with limited budgets.
Your Google quality score and ad rank are calculated using three main factors.
These include:
- ad relevance
- expected click-through rate
- landing page experience
Each of these factors will have a status of average, below average, or above average. Quality score is calculated at the keyword level and it can also be added to the ad group, account, or campaign level.
How to Find Your Quality Score
In order to improve your quality score, you need to know how to see quality score in AdWords (Google Ads).
There are three ways you can find your Google Ads quality score, you can:
- use the customize column command
- click the status command
- create a keyword performance report in your ad account.
Benefits of a Good Quality Score
There are different benefits to a good quality score and you need to care about it. A lower quality score can cost your business more money and you have to pay more per click. If you have a good quality score then you can save money on your PPC advertising.
Unless you already have the best possible score of 10, you should always be looking at different ways you can improve it in order to improve the position of your ads and save on costs associated with advertising.
Factors That Affect Your Quality Score
There are three main quality score factors.
Ad Relevance: This metric measures how close the keywords match the message in the ads. An above average quality score means you have a close match. A below average score could mean the keyword isn’t relevant to the business or your copy is too general.
Expected Click-Through Rate: The CTR is an estimate of how many people searching for the keywords will click on the ad. It’s calculated by looking at the past CTR performance of your ads.
Landing Page Experience: This metric refers to how useful and relevant your landing page is when a visitor has clicked on the ad. Things you want to pay attention to here include site speed and bounce rate. If you have a high bounce rate or the site takes too long to load then your quality score is going to be lower.
Types of Quality Score
Your quality score is not going to be just one number and there are different types of scores to know.
Account
The account score is a measure of the historical performance of all the ads and keywords in an account. An account with a longer history and better performance will perform better than a new one. It can take months to see any improvement once changes have been made to a quality score so it could be appealing to start fresh with a brand new account, but this will be against the Google Ad policy.
Ad Group
An ad group quality score shows you which areas need work within a campaign. Working with the lowest score areas first helps you get a better ROI.
Keyword
The keyword quality score is for your keywords and you can see this in the Google Ads interface. It’s calculated by the performance of the search queries that match your keyword. It’s based on the historical performance of Google until the keywords achieve a certain number of impressions in your account. Once it gets to this level of impressions the quality score will reflect the performance of your account.
Ad
The ad level score is for the ads running in each of your ad’s groups and the click-through rate. If you have a low CTR rate in your ad groups then you will have a lower quality score.
Display Network
The quality score for the display network is a bit different than the search network. The display network uses different bidding options and the aspects that contribute to your quality score depend on which options you choose. For example, if you are using a CPM model then your quality score is going to be affected by the landing page quality. If you are using a CPC model then the CTR of the ad, as well as the quality of the landing page, are considered. If you want to fix your display quality score then you can test different ad types. The more tests you run and the more options you have, the better chances to improve your CTR. Keep in mind that the display network is different so you need to make sure your ads are targeted to the demographics and the appropriate sites using the tools you have. It’s best to separate your display network campaigns and search network campaigns so that you are better able to manage them.
Mobile
Your mobile quality score is going to be calculated the same, regardless of the device you choose. The system will take into account distance between the business location and the user. Ads will have different quality scores for desktop and mobile counterparts.
How to Improve Your Quality Score
There are a number of different ways to increase Google Ads (AdWords) quality score.
The Importance of Keywords: If you didn’t do the proper keyword research then your entire account is going to suffer. Keywords are the foundation. Using your own log files and web analytics can give you a better idea of the right keywords than just free keyword tools. You want to avoid keywords that are too niche or too broad.
- Group Your Ads by Theme: It’s important to group your ads since Google looks at the relationship of the query of the user to the ad in order to determine relevance. When you group your ads into themes by keyword or target audience then you increase the likelihood of being relevant. Within each ad group, you should have only included closely related keywords.
- Have the Right Ad Formats: Make sure that your ad groups have both expanded text ads and responsive search ads in order to give you the best chance of getting a high CTR. Google has been pushing responsive search ads so you can get a better quality score when using these types of ads.
- Rework Your Landing Pages: Relevancy is key for your landing pages so you want to make sure that you are reworking your landing pages in order to reflect your ad groups. Do the keywords match? Is the page relevant to the user? Was your ad representative of your landing page?
- Work on Landing Page Loading: One of the many factors that determine quality score is the landing page experience. Part of this is load speed and this is one simple thing that you have control over that can help you improve your quality score.
- Think about Impression Share: Impression share is the actual number of times ads are viewed versus the potential number of times the ad could be viewed. This gives you some important insight about whether the ads are being delivered as much as they could be. Ads won’t be clicked on if they aren’t seen so it’s important to know your impression share score.
- Include Relevant Ad Extensions: Ad extensions don’t directly impact the quality score Google gives but they can increase CTR. These ad extensions help you expand your ad to give users more information about your business.
- Stay on Top of Your Score Changes: Staying on top of your global quality score is going to be important. Google does check sites on a regular basis, but it takes time to improve your quality score. You may feel like you are maintaining your score even when it can be starting to slip a little. In order to stay on top of the score, you want to monitor rankings, keywords, and any algorithm changes from Google. Keep adding in negative keywords as they come in to exclude non-relevant search queries.
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