What Is A Quality Score and How It Affects Google Ads?
There’s an art to mastering PPC and in order to do it, you’ll need to really know and understand what Quality Score is and means. This is especially true when it comes to Google Ads and something you should know if you want to have successful ads running for your business. Quality Scores have a huge influence over the cost as it relates to the effectiveness of any paid search campaigns.
Think of a Quality Score like a credit score, which can affect your chance for a loan and how high the interest rate will be. A Google Quality Score affects how Pay Per Click ads will perform and essentially how much you’ll end up paying for each click.
What Is Quality Score?
A Quality Score is basically Google’s rating of the relevance and quality of your PPC ads and its keywords. It’s used in figuring out your cost per click (CPC) and then is multiplied by a maximum bid to figure out your ad rank in the auction process of ads. So a Quality Score depends on various factors like:
- Land page relevance and quality
- Click-through rate
- Relevance of keyword to its ad group
- Historical Google ads account performance
- Relevance of the ad text
No one really knows how much weight each factor has (except those at Google), but we do know that the click-through rate is pretty important. When people see your ad and click on it, that’s a very strong indication to Google that the ad is relevant and helpful. So if your ad ranks higher, then the cost is lower.
Why You’d Want To Improve Your Google Quality Score?
If you want to set yourself up for more ROI, you’ll want to optimize your Quality Scores so that Google thinks your ad is relevant and useful. It’s also a correlation of a lower cost per conversion, which is how much you’ll pay when a person takes the action you want them to take with the ad. So, it’s not necessarily how much you pay for each click.
How To Increase Your Google Ads Quality Score?
Since a good Quality Score determines how and where your ads are seen, it’s vital to have a high score. You can achieve this by focusing your efforts on a few important areas, such as:
- Adding negative keywords – always identify, research and exclude irrelevant search terms that are costing you too much.
- Optimizing landing pages – always follow the best practices for landing pages and create them as they connect directly with your ad groups.
- Refining Ad Text – you’ll want to test out PPC ad copy that is targeted to individual ad groups. The more effective ads will get higher CTR, which is a great way to improve your Quality Score.
- Keyword organization – split keywords into organized groups that can be effectively tied to ad campaigns.
- Keyword research – find new and relevant keywords to add to campaigns, including long-tail ones.
In the end, Quality Score is really just a measure of relevance, and improving keyword Quality Score is simply structuring PPC campaigns into small groups of keywords. A low Quality Score means there’s a disconnect between keywords, landing page text, ad text and ad groups.
Let Digital Advertising Consulting improve your quality score and reduce your cost per click CPC.
