At its core, Google is all about providing quality experiences to users. Whether you’re trying to work with its algorithms for organic reach or you’re paying to advertise on the platform through search or display, Google is performing non-stop assessments of your content quality.
Thankfully, these judgements are provided to you to help inform improvements. These come in the form of a Quality Score.
What’s a Quality Score?
Google’s Quality Score is a rating system that scores the user experience for those that search the keywords connected to your ad/s. This comes in the form of a number from 1-10. 1 being extremely poor performing and 10 being the cream of the crop.
In your Google Ads Quality Score report, you can see where you come on this scale. A Quality Score is provided against each keyword. What this conveys to advertisers is how useful the content really is for the searching customer. The Quality Score is determined through a combined assessment of the following factors:
- Ad relevance
- Expected click-through rate
- Landing page experience
- Ad text relevance
- Historical Google Ads account performance.
Why is Google Ads Quality Score so important?
Understanding whether ads are useful for those searching for them is incredibly important. Money is wasted when ads aren’t connecting effectively with their target audience. Learning where you’re falling down presents a huge opportunity to craft your ads (potentially even your business messaging) to achieve greater appeal.
Google Ad Relevance Score
The Google Ad Relevance Score tells you if your ads match the expectations of the user searching the keywords it’s connected to. You absolutely want to know this and want to make sure it’s aligned. If your ad is solving the problem of the searcher, your ad is going to perform well. If it’s somehow misaligned, you’re wasting money targeting this keyword.
Expected click-through rate
Even the least savvy Google Ads user understands that you want click-through rates to be high. If Google is telling you that it doesn’t expect your ads to convert, you’ll want to try a better tactic.
Landing page experience
The landing page experience is one of the most valuable elements in the Google Quality Score puzzle. If your ads perform amazingly and then go nowhere to convert into leads, you’re pouring money down the drain. The Google Ads Quality Score works to help you optimise the entire experience to ensure you connect with your customer and secure them as a lead.
Ad text relevance
Say your keywords are correct. Your landing page experience is solid. But still, your ad text doesn’t really capture attention or effectively communicate what you offer to compel your audience to click through. You would obviously want to know this. This information can help you to write better copy to get the right people clicking your ads.
Historical Google Ads account performance
Improving your Quality Score is not just great for your conversions. It’s also important to build your reputation with Google. If your account is known for continuously poor performance, you’re not going to rank as highly as your content is known to have a poor user experience. Conversely, if you have a history of high performance, this can improve your Quality Score.
Understanding Google Ads Quality Score will help you increase your click-through rate (CTR) without raising your bid through the roof.
Benefits of improving Google Ads Quality Score
It should be fairly easy to deduce the benefits of Quality Score optimisation, but let’s explore them for clarity.
Improves ad visibility
The better your score, the more people you’re going to reach, and with a higher Quality Score, this means those people are more relevant.
Reduces your CPC
Improving your ad performance has a direct impact on your cost per click. More reach for less investment. The more you appease the algorithms and boost your user experience, the more Google will reward you.
Improves click-through rates
The more relevant your ads, the better your click-through rates will be. Increasing your Quality Score will help you to achieve this.
Improves conversion rates
With the collective power of the above points, plus the focus on landing page performance, your Quality Score is a holistic framework through which you get in front of, appeal to, attract and convert the right people.
Quality Score Optimisation
With your Quality Score, you will get a pretty good idea of what needs to be improved. As for how to go about those improvements, here are a few tips to help:
- Keep up keyword research: Always look for new, relevant keywords, including long-tail phrases to add to your campaigns.
- Remove outdated keywords: As you introduce new keywords, identify and remove those that are wasting your budget.
- Try ad text iterations: Write a few different pieces of copy for your ad, try them out and identify which gives you a higher CTR.
- Optimising your landing pages: Build landing pages that perfectly compliment your ads to ensure an intuitive transition from their ad click to your landing page.
It can take time to optimise Quality Scores but that time saves you ad spend and increases ROI. Alternatively, you can let some professionals take it out of your hands to guarantee the greatest results are achieved. The AdVisible team is a group of such professionals, living and breathing ads — Google, Facebook and everything in between — to get our clients high Quality Scores and higher returns.
Contact our team today to learn how we can help.
