When running Google Search campaigns there are various components to take care of, but one of the most important components is the quality score. That is because the Quality Score has a big impact on the cost and general performance of paid search campaigns. Generally, The Google Quality Score affects how campaigns perform and how much to pay for each click. In other words, improving quality score lowers costs.
In this article, we will run through important factors to consider to improve quality score. Let’s get started!
What is Quality Score?
Google Ads Quality Score is a rating system focusing on the quality and relevancy of keywords and ads. It is measured on a scale from 1-10 and is applied to each keyword in your campaigns. In general, it is a useful tool that provides insights into how relevant your landing page and ads are to the keywords in your account. The quality score is determined by 3 factors, which are:
Ad relevance which measures how well ad copy matches the specific keywords in the ad group.
Expected CTR which measures how likely it is that someone who has been expose to an ad will actually click on it.
Landing page experience which measures how relevant and useful a website’s landing page is to people who will click on an ad.
How to improve your quality score
When working with quality scores, the optimal goal is to have a ranking of 10 out of 10. However, this can be a difficult task to achieve. First of all, the quality score is measured based on each keyword. A good quality score for branded keywords is between 8 to 10, where it is only around 7 to 9 for high-intent keywords and 7 for low-intent keywords. For competitor keywords, the ideal score is about 3+. Hence, it is a challenge to hit a 10/10 score for the entire account including all keywords.
For each category, there are 3 statuses your keywords might have: ‘Above Average’, ‘Average, and ‘Below Average’. These statuses can help to identify which keywords are in need of improvement and within which category to increase the overall quality score. The statuses of ‘Above Average’ and ‘Average’ indicates that there are no major problems with the keywords compared to all other keywords across Google Ads. Needless to say, we recommend to focus on the keywords with the status of ‘Below Average’.
However, there are a number of things that can be done to achieve as high a quality score as possible. In the next section, we will explore how to improve quality score based on the factors mentioned previously such as ad relevance, expected CTR, and landing page experience.
Ad relevance
If the ad relevance status shows ‘Below Average’ it means that your ad or keyword might not be specific enough or that the ad group might cover too many topics.
The main way to improve your ad relevance is to make sure each ad group, (including keywords and ads) only focuses on one specific product or service at a time to keep it as closely related as possible. For example, if you are a clothing company you should have different ad groups for each separate item such as dresses, tops, skirts, shirts, blouse, etc. This way, ads and keywords may easily be optimised to exactly what the customers are looking for.
Expected CTR
If the status shows ‘below average’ for the expected CTR it means that the ad copy is not related closely enough with the keyword and therefore, it is less likely that people will click on the ad.
Hence, the best way to improve expected CTR is to be sure that the keywords are closely related to the ad copy. So remember to include these keywords in the ad text. This demonstrates that the ad is relevant to what they are searching for and will be more inclined to click on the ad. As a rule of thumb, you should include the keyword in at least one or two headlines, one in the description section, and in the path, also known as the display URL.
Furthermore, be very active in your search term optimisation and make sure to exclude keywords that do not relate to your specific ad group.
Landing page experience
If you see a ‘below average’ at the status of the landing page experience it means that the landing page does not correlate with the keywords or ads. If the landing page shows something completely different than what the ad is about, Google will see it as irrelevant and therefore rank the landing page experience as low.
A good way to improve landing page experience is to include relevant, useful, and original content that is directly relevant to the ad text and keywords. If someone clicks on an ad for a ‘dress’, it does not make sense to be directed to a page with an overview of all clothes on the website. It also goes the other way around – if they are looking for clothes in general, they should not be directed to a page specifically displaying dresses.
However, all three factors correlate and if you improve one factor it can affect the other factors as well. E.g. by doing ad copy optimisation you might improve both the expected CTR as well as the ad relevance, and even the landing page experience.
Calculate your Quality Score
To get a better understanding of how your account is performing in terms of quality score, calculate it based on either account, campaign, or ad group level. As the quality score is measured on the keyword level, average it out and get the quality score on either ad group, campaign, or account level.
A quality score may be calculated based on impressions, clicks, or conversions. Impression-weighted quality score means that keywords with more impressions are more important when calculating the average quality score. The same goes for clicks and conversions, so the keyword with the most clicks or conversions will be valued higher in the calculation.
To calculate the weighted average you have to:
- Multiply the clicks from each keyword with its respective quality score
- Get the sum of the overall clicks*quality score
- Get the sum of the overall clicks
- Divide the sum of clicks*quality score with the overall clicks
- And you will find the weighted average quality score
Final tip
An easier way to monitor your overall quality score is by setting up a script. This will allow you to check the Google Quality Score for the entire account and help you work more efficiently towards achieving a higher overall quality score. You can find the quality score tracker and many more interesting scripts here.
Also, feel free to drop us an email at hello@admiral.digital if you’d like us to do an audit for your current Google Ads campaigns and look into how you can improve your quality score. We’ll be more than happy to assist you!
