Every paid advertising platform that uses an auction system has to have a way to differentiate between quality ads or keywords. Without a rating system, the auction would allow spots on their platform to be ranked by whoever is willing to spend the most money. While this could be financially feasible for the platform owners, it could lead to substandard results. Google has an ingenious approach to this dilemma, and it comes in the form of Quality Scores. So, what is a Quality Score, and how do we improve it?
What is a Quality Score?
Quality Scores estimate the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. The higher your Quality Score, the higher your ad positioning on their search engine results. Quality Scores can also estimate your performance. When you improve the factors of a Quality Score, you can lower your bid prices, leading to cheaper clicks and higher performance.
The Quality Score is reported on a 1–10 scale and can be viewable by adding the Quality Score column to your reports, which can be found on the Google Ads Dashboard. Quality Score is an aggregated estimate of your overall performance in the ad auction. Being aggregate is not included in Google’s auction time to determine Ad Rank. Basically, it estimates the performance that was displayed during the auction.
What impacts your Quality Score?
Quality Score is ranked on three variables. These include:
- Expected click-through rate
- Ad relevance
- Landing page experience
These three variables are extremely important in determining your overall quality. If you have a high-performing expected click-through rate, your content is relevant to what people are searching for. If the ads have high relevance, it’ll mean people searching on Google are getting the results that they’re looking for. With a quality landing page experience, it shows that anyone clicking your ad and being directed to your landing page will have a quality experience. These three factors will help to provide a cheaper cost-per-click.
If you have a cheaper CPC, your ads will be shown at a cheaper rate, allowing more people to view your ads based on any given budget. These factors will also help to increase your ad ranking. If you have a higher ad ranking, your ad will be shown over your competitors’ ads. The goal is to get your ads in the top one to four ad sections — as you don’t want them slipping to the bottom of results or, even worse, the second page of Google results.
Improving Your Quality Score
So, how can you improve these three variables? One way is to use a structured system. The goal of a campaign is to structure it so that it’s highly relevant to what people are searching for. The purpose of any campaign is to have highly qualified leads. You can compare it to a funnel.
At the top of the funnel, you’ll have someone starting their search cycle. They’ll Google whatever goods or services they’re looking for and, hopefully, be shown relevant ads for the keyword they searched for. At that point, they’ll continue down the funnel by clicking on an ad that looks appealing and be directed to the landing page. If the landing page is relevant to their search, they’ll continue the sales cycle and eventually follow through with whatever cost-per-action you’ve implemented. That continues to the bottom of your funnel, sending a highly qualified lead to your inbox or purchasing to your landing page.
The key point is to make your keywords, ad, and landing page relevant through the entire campaign creation cycle. As long as you’re following these key points, you should be able to create high-performing campaigns that lead to high-quality scores and low-cost-per-click campaigns.