Quality Score will always be important, whether you’re brand-new to Google Ads or you’ve been managing several accounts for a while.
Some people are terrified by it, some are just confused, but what is it, why is it significant, and most importantly, how can you make yours better?
What Is Quality Score?
Quality Score is how Google works out the quality of the advert and website you are providing the person searching.
Your Google Ads Quality Score will affect both the position you’ll appear in the results and how much it will cost you per click.
Your Quality Score is affected by a number of different factors, including:
- Estimated click-through-rate
- Relevance of your keyword to its ad group
- Relevance of your ad to the keyword
- Relevance and quality of your landing page
- Account-wide performance
The Quality Score you see in your Google Ads console is an estimate, at auction time a real-time score is produced and used to determine the quality you’ll offer for that specific search result.
Why Does It Matter?
Quality Score is THE factor used by Google to determine the position of your ad and then how much you’ll have to pay for the click.
When more than one advertiser is bidding to appear for a specific keyword or phrase, the auction process begins! Google then begins to work out the position of the ads and the cost.
The position (or ad rank) is determined with the formula: CPC Bid x Quality Score
The adverts are then ranked from top to bottom.
This means that if you have a higher Quality Score you can make up for a lower CPC bid, which will give you a higher ad rank without having to pay as much as other advertisers.
Once your ad rank has been determined, Quality Score is then used again to work out how much you’ll pay when and if someone clicks on your advert.
This formula to work this out is – (position of the advertiser below you / Quality Score) + 1p
This means that you’ll never have to pay more than you need to and a higher Quality Score will save you money.
Types Of Quality Score
As you can see there is more to Quality Score than you would initially think!
It’s definitely not a simple score to calculate.
Types of quality score include:
- Account-level
This is your historical account performance – lots of low-quality keywords will drag down the performance of your account and high-performing campaigns can improve your overall account. - Ad Group
An average Quality Score in any given ad group – a way to identify where you should concentrate your efforts by finding the lower-performing ad groups. - Keyword-level
This is the typical Quality Score which you can see in Google Ads – this is worked out based on queries which exactly match your keyword, so match types will not affect it. - Ad-level
The different click-through rates for your ads will contribute to your Quality Score – be sure to keep on top of their performance. - Landing page
Landing page quality takes into account a range of factors including relevance, originality, transparency, speed, user experience and navigability.
How To Improve Quality Score
If you have a low Quality Score or you’re looking for ways to compete with high performing competitors or just want to spend less than try these 10 tips for improving your Quality Score.
Improve Overall Performance
The health of your account as a whole has an influence on your Quality Score, so take some time out to look at the overall performance of your account. You might want to look at:
- Are you bidding on your brand?
These clicks are cheap and are likely to be one of the best performing campaigns in your account – this will bring up your overall average quality score! - Are you just leaving your low performers?
Find your account average and which campaigns are falling below. If they’re not working, pause or change them – you might think there’s no harm in leaving them there but they could be dragging down the rest of your account!
Review your account structure
Quality Score has a lot to do with relevance. If your account isn’t structured to give you the opportunity to make everything super-relevant, you might need to rethink your account structure!
- How many keyword are in your AdGroups? Do you have more than 15-20 keywords?
You need your ad groups to be lean. If you have lots of keywords in your ad groups, you need to do something about it. Work through your keywords and split them into relevant groups. - Start from scratch
Get out a pen and paper and without looking at your current structure draft out the key themes and sub-themes for your account. Does this look anything like what you have setup at the moment? If not, you might want to rebuild your campaigns.
Improve your landing pages
Your landing pages are important for both your conversion rates and your Quality Score.
- Are your landing pages relevant?
Make sure you’re sending traffic to the most relevant page on your website. Don’t send people to your homepage! - Are they clear?
When someone gets to your landing page, is it relevant to the search and clear? If you feel like your website is letting you down, contact us to help you build a new website or better landing pages.
Diagnose and fix technical issues
Have you checked all of your URLs recently? There might be some technical issues holding you back that could go otherwise unnoticed.
- Check for 404s
Audit your account to make sure you’re not pointing to pages that no longer exist. - Check links
Are your website URLs formatted correctly and are you sending people to the most relevant pages? If your account has been running for a while, it’s worth checking through to make sure you’re not sending people to pages that have been replaced for better ones.
Website speed
Google uses website speed as a factor for Quality Score but it can also have an effect on the likelihood of your visitor remaining on your site and making a purchase.
- Google Analytics
Use Google Analytics or Google Search Console for average page speeds for each of your landing pages. - 3rd Party Tools
Use GTMetrix or Pingdom to check your load speeds - Google PageSpeed Insights
Enter your URL for Google to provide you with a brief report on your page speed, as well as tips on changes you can make to optimise your website for speed.
Google Ad Extensions
Are you making use of ad extensions? Ad extensions can improve click-through rates and that Quality Score includes calculations on the estimated click-through, so if you’re not, you might be missing out!
- Find relevant extensions
Take a look through the possible ad extensions – are there any here that you could make use of which you aren’t already? - Look for ad groups with no extensions
There are extensions that can apply to almost all ads – make sure you use all the extensions that apply to you.
Google Ad Optimisation & CTR
Extensions are important but don’t forget about your ads themselves! You want to continually improve your ads to improve relevance and click-through rates.
- Optimise ads
Make sure your ads are as relevant as possible to the keyword and landing page by including the keyword where you can. - Set up monitoring and replace low performers
Ads are the perfect candidates for monitoring. Make sure you’re never just running one ad in one ad group! Create multiple ads and run them against each other, see which performs best and use this to improve and apply the learning across your whole account.
Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI)
Trying to figure out a more advanced technique to improving your Quality Score? Why not try Dynamic Keyword Insertion – this will make sure your visitor’s query appears right in your ad and can increase click-through and therefore Quality Score.
- Find DKI candidates
Find the ads you think could benefit from Dynamic Keyword Insertion – but be careful, you need to make sure you have a very tight ad group to make this work well. - Identify potential issues
DKI can get you into all sorts of trademark violations ?? and issues which could get you in hot water or just make you look silly. Before implementing this, make sure you’ve addressed potential problems.
For more on what these issues could be, see the Dynamic Keyword Insertion Good, Bad and Ugly.
Negative keywords
Part of keeping your account tight and ad groups lean is keeping on top of your negative keyword lists.
- Add common negatives
Take a proactive approach by adding some negative keywords which are likely to bring low-quality traffic to your ads. - Monitor search terms report
You can only guess so much, so take a reactive approach too. Keep on top of your search terms report and add any irrelevant queries to your negative keywords.
Scheduled monitoring
You need to make time for monitoring your account. If your Quality Score is suffering and you don’t know where to turn, at Springer Marketing we can help you.
If you need help with managing your Google Ads, our Google Ads Managers are on hand to give you a FREE PPC Audit.
