What Is Google Ads Quality Score And How To Improve It?

Running a Google Ads Campaign facilitates promoting and advertising your products or services with keywords. If done right, Google Ads has the potential to transform your business to the next level. After all, people across the globe use Google to search over 100 billion times a month. That’s a whopping 2.3 million searches every second! From increasing the traffic on your website to better conversion, from new leads to more sales, with Google Ads, the possibilities are endless. 

So, after much deliberation, you want to dive into the digital marketing domain. You have selected your keywords, written catchy ad text, and designed a pretty landing page. After running your ads for a few weeks, you notice that you are not getting sufficient traction or conversion.

Why is your Google Ads campaign not working? Well, Google Ads Quality Score is the deciding factor for making the most of your ads. Read on to know what is a quality score, its importance, the factors that affect it, and how you can improve it:

What Is a Quality Score? Why Does It Matters? 

Simply speaking, quality score, measured from 1 to 10, defines the credibility of Google Ads. It measures the relevance, quality, and performance of the following three key areas: keywords, landing page, and ad text. It indicates the ranking of your ad and helps you decide how much cost per click (CPC) you should bid in the auction. In a nutshell, quality score is Google’s way of estimating the success of your ad campaign. While a lower Quality Score might seem like a wasted budget, a higher Quality Score shows that your ads are useful and relevant.

What Are The Factors That Affect The Quality Score?

More than just being a metric for your Ads performance, Quality Score is a powerful tool in improving their performance as well. As mentioned earlier, the Quality Score is a combination of the following three factors:

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Image Source- Search Engine Land

Expected CTR

This keyword-related factor shows how likely a user will click on your ad while searching for a related keyword. This factor takes the past performances of the keywords used in your ad campaigns into account. Based on past experience of keywords, Google estimates the rate at which users will click on your ads.

Landing Page Experience

Measuring the landing page experience is Google’s way of telling how relevant your website’s landing page will be for the user who clicked on your ad. Ideally, your landing page should be related to the keyword searched, clear, and useful to the user. While optimizing your landing page design, ask yourself these questions:

  • Does your landing page follow the best design practices?
  • Does your landing page help the user with the right content as promised in your ad?
  • Is the design and content on your landing page easy to comprehend and navigate?
  • How long does it take to load your landing page?

Ad Relevancy

Another keyword-related factor, this Google metric indicates how well your keyword matches with content and message in your ads. If your keywords are too broad or vague, it does not result in a valuable user experience. For example, if yours is a marketing agency that deals in Facebook Advertising & Instagram Advertising, keywords like “Facebook Ads” or “Instagram Ads” might be relevant. But if you are using both these keywords on the same ad, it won’t fetch high ad relevance.

How to Check Ad Quality Score?

Google evaluates each of these factors in three categories – above average, average, and below average. The overall Quality Score is the weighted average of these three factors. Expected CTR and landing page experience are comparatively more significant than the ad relevance and have more weights. You can check your Google Ads Quality Score with the following steps:

  • Log in to your Google Ads account and select “Keywords” in the left menu, which opens a table.
  • Click on the “Columns” icon on the table’s upper right corner.
  • Click on the Quality Score section under the “Modify columns for keywords” option. You can see the overall present Quality Score with the component-wise breakdown of each factor. 
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How to Improve the Quality Score of Your Ad?

Now that you are aware of the Quality Score, its importance, and its factors, here are some tips to improve it: 

Add Relevant Keywords In Ads For Relevancy

If your Google Ads campaign lacks in the “Ad Relevance” department, it is less likely to result in conversions. Here are a few tips to improve the “below average” or “average” ad relevance:

  • Use an ad text language that matches more directly to the user’s search terms.
  • If your business deals in a particular set of products or services, try to group multiple keywords to create a theme.
  • If you can’t use the same ad for different keywords, split them into separate ad groups to match better with the searches.
  • Another smart way is to add either keywords directly or keyword related text in your ad copies as they improve your keywords’ Quality Score.

Add Ad Extensions For More Information

Ad extensions provide additional information about your business, products, or services. They expand your Google search ads so that they take more space in the search engine, which increases the CTR.  Some of the most popular Google Ad extensions are:

  • Sitelinks: To show links to your website’s specific pages.
  • Callouts: To include descriptive texts.
  • Promotion: To specify a particular offer or sale.
  • Image: To complement your ads.
  • Location: To provide your business address.

As shown in below ad, ‘Eyes Collection‘ , ‘Face Collection‘, ‘Makeup Trends‘, ‘Lips Collection‘, ‘Makeup Tips‘ are sitelinks extension and ‘Maybelline Colossal Liner‘ is the price extension.

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Optimize Landing Page

We live in a digital era where speed and data are the more crucial aspects of any website. Since your landing page is the first page a potential customer sees or experiences, it is crucial that you get it right. A good landing page should be easy to comprehend, navigate, or use and load effortlessly. No matter how extensive your website’s design is, if it takes forever to load or confuses your potential customers, it is useless. Similarly, your landing page must have a clear CTA to direct your customers and increase the conversion.

  • You can use analytics tools and sites like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and Page Speed Insights to optimize your landing page.
  • Apart from its design and speed, ensure that its content is interesting and has relevant keywords. 
  • While designing your landing page, think from your customer’s point of view. Design your landing page in such a way that it is user friendly and less clumsy.
  • Ideally, you would want to include unique keywords for all your ad groups in your landing page. However, it often gets challenging to do so, especially if your business deals in diverse products or services.

So, even if you are not able to design the landing page for your every single ad group, make sure you include all your important, high-impact keywords. Alternatively, you can consider a separate landing page for the other ad groups. Both these strategies help you increase the quality score as well as the user engagement.

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Do Your Proper Keyword Research Using A Keyword Planner

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Keywords are the gateway that connects your customers with your ads and is the most important aspect that affects your Google Ads Quality Score. After all, keywords decide whether your ad will show up on the search results or not. Since keywords lay the foundation for any PPC-based marketing, make sure that you research them extensively. If your keyword search is improper or insufficient, your ad campaign will definitely suffer. Instead of depending on the public tools to generate random or irrelevant keywords, analyze your log files or try a private keyword planner for better visibility. 

Revise Your Ad Copies

Like any other form of writing, revising your ad text several times improves the quality of your ads. A high-quality ad is concise, tidy, neat, and focuses only on one product or service to draw the maximum attention of your potential customers. If your ads are vague or scattered between many products, they are less likely to be effective. Revising your ad copies multiple times results in Quality Score optimization and makes your customers feel that they exactly get what they want from your ad.

Keep Track Of Impression Share

Impression Share (IS) is another smart metric that tells you whether you can increase your ad’s reach to more customers by increasing your budget. Expressed in a percentage, it is the fraction of the impressions your ads currently get from the total eligible impressions.

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Impression Share is Google’s way of telling you that your ad campaign has potential and whether you should increase your Google advertising cost. While estimating IS, Google analyses the ad auctions throughout the day and tells you when your ads were competitive.  

Keep Track Of Historical Data Of Quality Score

One of the best things about Google Ads Quality Score is that you can check the performance of your previous quality scores. By keeping track of the historical data of quality scores, you can analyze them and determine which keywords have worked for your ad campaigns in the past. Also, Google lets you select a time range for reporting the historical data of quality score and it’s all three components- ad relevance, landing page experience, and expected CTR.

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More importantly, the component-wise breakup can guide you on how to focus your ad campaign. For example, after you optimize your landing page, use high-performing keywords from your past experience.

Summing it up

With quality score metrics, Google gives you an opportunity to optimize your ad campaign to reach out to more customers and improve conversion. This article tells you what Google Ads Quality Score is, why it is significant, which factors affect it, and how to increase quality score for growing your business. Hopefully, this handy guide helps you plan your Google Ad campaigns in a better way to increase sales and save money in the longer run.

FAQs

Google assigns a Quality Score for every keyword from 1 to 10. Anything above 8 is a good Quality Score in Google Ads.

Yes, CTR is one of the three factors that govern the Quality Score. If your CTR is below average, improving it can significantly increase your Quality Score. 

High-quality Google Ads use the right keywords to catch the attention of potential customers. An ad text that is clear and tidy maximizes CTR. 

Google Ad Quality Score depends on expected CTR, Ad relevancy, and landing page experience.

Every time a Google user searches for a keyword, Google uses Quality Score to show more relevant ads. Interesting and relevant ads help Google generate more revenue with targeted advertising.

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