What Is Google Ads Quality Score?

What Is Google Ads Quality Score?

What Is Google Ads Quality Score? 1920 1280 George Cotter

The Quaility Score metric maybe something you’ve seen or heard about in regards to Google Ads but what exactly is it all about?

In simple terms the higher your quality score the more cost effective your pay-per-click spend can become. You can even save money by improving your score by increasing the relevancy of your campaigns.

When you run a standard paid search campaign in Google Ad (previously Google AdWords) each keyword is given a Quality Score out of 10. This score changes over time based on a variety of factors.

What factors affect Quality Score?

Your ads click through rate (CTR)

The CTR of your ads is the % of people who click on your ads after seeing them. Your CTR is a good measure of how relevant your ad text is to your target keywords. Ensuring you have set up effective ad groups with engaging ads is essential to hitting a good CTR.

The content of your ads

The actual wording of your ads should closely relate to the target keywords you want to display for. The sounds far easier than it is as it’s quite challenging for your keywords to be present whilst also using copy that delivers your messages and attracts clicks.

Your landing pages

The landing page is the page on your website that you identify you want the user to land on after clicking an ad. Google judges your landing pages on the relevancy of the content and the overall user experience, including load time. It’s absolutely vital to use a landing that closely reflects the keyword a user has used to find one of your ads. The landing page should also produce conversions and be very sales orientated. It’s advisable to use dedicated pages away from your main website where you can test special offers and different page layouts.

How does Google work out ads positions?

Your Quality Score along with your maximum cost-per-click (CPC) are the determining factors Google uses to work out your Ad Rank for search campaigns. Although, you need to have a reasonable Quality Score for your ads to even enter the Google Ads Auction.

Ad Rank = CPC x Quality Score

Taking the above calculation you can quickly see how simply entering a high bid isn’t enough to regularly appear in the top positions. It’s also makes it more clear how advertisers can actually spend less and still increase their ad positions.

Google conveniently gives you clear information on how it’s grading each part so you can identify places where you can make worthwhile improvements.

You can’t buy the top positions

When working on your campaigns it’s not recommended to focus on changes that will improve your Quality Score. Instead, you should take the position that you want to improve your campaigns structure and content relevancy, and if you’re doing the right things improvements to your quality score will follow.

You’ll also be wrong to think that having a high Quality Score will also mean you’ll end up with with a high performing campaign. The position your ads appear in relates to your Ad Rank (as we’ve already discussed), and as the early caluclation shows, key a part of achieving a strong Ad Rank is your keyword bidding (max CPC). As is the case that your ads won’t show if your Quality Score is very low, they also won’t show if your budget and bids are not high enough.

Thanks to the Quality Score metric you can now longer simply bid your way to the top positions with little effort or thought put into your wider campaign targeting and website as a whole.

About The Author

George Cotter

I launched Tall Marketing to bring fresh ideas and digital marketing strategies that are both current and change the way local businesses think about marketing themselves online.