Do you want to generate more ROAS from your Google Ad Campaigns? Then you must have a thorough understanding of the Quality Score to launch effective PPC campaigns for promoting your business online. So make sure to read this as we are going to discuss in-depth about quality score and how it can affect the performance of your PPC campaigns.
Search engine marketing has become quite popular these days because the ads are displayed to a user based on the keywords targeted by the advertiser. But in the search engine results, there are only a few ad slots where ads would get displayed along with the organic results.
With too many advertisers bidding on the exact or similar keywords hoping to rank their ads on the top, Google gives advertisers a metric called Quality Score. Also, it is used to determine AD Rank which is responsible for displaying them in a particular position within the ad slots on search engine results pages through an automated auction process.
Let me share with you what actually it is all about.
It is a metric used and provided by Google on a scale of 1-10 for the advertisers to help them optimize their campaigns to achieve the best results. However, the score shown is not the one used for calculating Ad Rank because it varies in real-time affecting the ranking of your ads in the search results.
Quality score is calculated depending on a lot of factors like
- Click-Through Rate(CTR)
- The relevance of the keywords to the ad groups, ad text, landing page
- Landing Quality and Relevance
- Historical performance of your Google Ads Account
Among all these CTR is considered to be the most important one and there is no clear information about how each factor “weighs” in the calculation of the score by Google. Remember you must never make a mistake of getting confused between Ad Rank and Quality Score.
In fact, Ad Rank is evaluated based on other factors like CPC Bid apart from the quality score and is responsible for the placement of your ad when an ad goes through the auction process. Both of them are mathematically related as
Ad Rank = Max Bid * Quality Score
So now you got to know about the difference between Ad Rank and Quality Score, you might be wondering why it is used by Google. Imagine if you are using Google to search for something and found irrelevant ads on the page. How do you feel in this case? Mostly annoyed making you have a bad experience that might make you use another search engine.
Remember Google makes a major portion of its revenue from these ads only. Especially with Pay Per Click ads, they would make money only when an ad gets a click that happens only when the ads are relevant to the search made by the user. So when only relevant ads show up they would be clicked by the user and they make money as well charging the advertiser.
Additionally, it provides a better experience for the user of the search engine. Even from the perspective of an advertiser, it is an essential metric to track so that you can get high quality leads from your campaigns instead of random clicks wasting your advertising budgets. Now let me share with you how Quality can affect your PPC campaigns in detail.
How Quality Score Can Affect Your Campaigns Performance?
Having a good score is essential for running successful PPC campaigns on Google and driving the best results from them. It can affect many aspects of your campaigns like
1. Ad Rankings:
Higher the score, higher rankings your ads would get competing with the ads from the other advertisers in the auction.
2. Lower Ad Costs:
You would be paying less for a click when your score is high before Google or any other search engine prefers the ads that are more relevant receiving clicks than with the highest bids. So you might get less cost per click or cost per conversion helping you gain maximum Return On Advertising Spend from your campaigns.
If you are a PPC marketer with a goal to achieve better results from your Google Ad Campaigns then you should aim to obtain the best score. However, for any kind of PPC advertiser, sometimes it would be hard to improve the score because of various reasons like competitor ads, the number of advertisers bidding, etc.
Remember it is a useful metric that can help you understand how effective your campaigns are in reaching the right people. Just focus on improving it by testing new things like headlines, keywords, etc because you can get quality leads or more conversions from them.
Now before we discuss the methods to improve your score let me share with you different types of scores that you might find while managing your ad campaigns.
Types of Quality Scores:
1. Keyword Level Score:
Keyword Level score can be directly checked from the Google Ads Interface with 10 being the best and 1 being the lowest. It helps you understand how relevant your keywords are to the search queries irrespective of the match type used.
Remember that you would get the right score only after your ad gets a certain number of impressions that is termed as Impression Threshold. Until then the score would be based on the historic performance of your Google Ad Account and once you gain enough impressions it would help you understand how the keywords performed in your ads.
2. Ad Group Level Score:
Ad Group Level score helps you understand where you should focus to improve it. As different ads have different Click-Through Rates optimizing the ads that have less CTR can help in improving the score of the entire Ad Group. Even in the case of a low keyword-level score, if your ad group score is high you can do more research about the keywords and make it better.
3. Landing Page Score:
Landing page score is not a metric that can be found directly inside the dashboard but it directly impacts the keyword level score. It is determined based on the factors like
Relevancy of Content across your ads to the landing page
Navigation on the page
User Experience
Even though these are the most important ones, there are many other types of scores like Account Level score, Display Network score, Mobile Score, etc that are used depending on the type of Ad Campaign like Display Campaigns, Mobile App Campaigns, etc.
So now you might be wondering how you can improve your score? Let me share some of the ways to improve it.
How To Improve The Quality Score in Google Ads?
1. Effective Keyword Research:
Performing keyword research in the right way you would be able to find different relevant keywords for your ad campaigns. This helps in bidding on the right keywords making your ads reach the right audience resulting in higher CTR.
2. Consistent Usage of Keywords:
Bidding on the keywords and using them in both ads and landing page content make them look relevant for a user visiting a website clicking on the ad.Thus improving your score.
3. Optimizing Landing Pages:
Landing page optimization is essential if you are running ads to generate a lead or sale from a landing page. There are various aspects around which a landing page can be optimized like
i.Relevance:
Having the same keywords used in the ads on landing pages make it more relevant. Along with that, you should make sure that same offer is promoted on the ad and landing page.
ii.Speed and Responsiveness:
It should load fast in a few seconds so that even a visitor with a slow internet speed can view your page. Additionally, it should be responsive across different devices as most of the traffic might from mobile devices.
iii.Design:
The layout of the landing page should look good with the primary focus on making the visitor take a specific action depending on your business goal.
4. Negative Keywords:
Without adding the negative keywords you would be wasting your budget. Make sure to monitor the search queries and add irrelevant keywords or terms as negative keywords so that you won’t reach the wrong people with your ads.
Conclusion: Guide About Quality Score
Achieving success with your PPC campaigns on Google can be possible with a higher score. Even though it’s by Google, as advertiser checking and focusing on improving it would definitely help you in reducing your ad costs reaching the relevant audience. Thus it helps in obtaining the best Return On Advertising Spends(ROAS) from your Google Ad Campaigns.
If you are struggling to improve your Quality score and looking for a Google Ads Expert then please feel free to get in touch. Being an experienced Google Ads Professional, I have helped many brands generate millions of revenue from their campaigns optimizing them with the best strategies.
