What is Google Ads Quality Score and How to Improve Them?
In the current era of digital marketing, there are thousands of advertisers trying to get top rankings on the same keywords. Out of these thousands of advertisers, many of them even use the same tools for automating their bids. Considering this, how does the search engine decide which ad gets the top spot and how much does each advertiser pay?
The answer to this question is google ads quality score which is a big part of this equation. Google ads quality scores are something that the advertisers can influence even when they have automated the bids which have led to the need of having google ads quality score in the first place.
This article will focus on the following topics:
- What is Google Ads Quality Score?
- Factors Determining Your Google Ads Quality Score
- How to Improve Your Google Ads Quality Score?
- Benefits of Improving Google Ads Quality Score
- How Can Deskera Assist in Improving Your Google Ads Quality Score?
- Key Takeaways
- Related Articles
What is Google Ads Quality Score?
The Google ads quality score is Google's rating of the overall user experience that your ads and landing pages provide when users search for your keywords. This is represented on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest.
In essence, the google ads quality score is an indication of whether your ads and landing pages are useful to your consumers or not. In fact, through google ads quality score you get to know the quality, relevance and performance of your keywords and PPC (pay-per-click) ads.
This score is used to determine your cost-per-click (CPC) and multiplied by your maximum bid to determine your ad rank in the ad auction process. Considering that your google ads quality score affects:
- The position of your ads
- And your cost-per-action,
they have a major impact on your PPC success and profitability.
What needs to be remembered is that the google ads quality scores are available for each keyword, hence giving you the quality score for at least the visible keyword level. Depending on your google ads quality score for each of these keywords, Google will add either a penalty or a bonus.
This means that the higher is your google ads quality score, the lower is your cost-per-click, which in turn will give you higher returns on investment and better ad positions. If however, you do not have a good quality score, you will have to pay a lot for each keyword’s click.
Factors Determining Your Google Ads Quality Score
The main purpose of google ads quality score is to show how relevant, useful and important your keywords, ads and landing pages are to a visiting user. Hence, the 3 main factors which determine your google ads quality score for a given account are:
Expected Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
Expected CTR is a keyword related factor that measures how likely it is that someone will click on your ad when searching for the keyword associated with it. This metric does not consider ad position, extensions or other ad formats that may make your ad more or less visible.
Instead, this metric takes into account the past keyword performance based on the ad position. This is because Google wants to find out how likely your keyword will result in a click-through.
While determining google ads quality score, the expected CTR is based on the idea that the user’s search term will match your keyword exactly. In real-time, Google uses a more accurate measurement of expected CTR based on search terms by considering other auction factors like the type of device.
If you have an average or above-average expected CTR, it means that your expected CTR for this keyword is good or better than all the other keywords on the Google ads network. However, if it is below the expected CTR, it means that your keyword is worse than all the other keywords on the Google ads network. In this case, you should adjust your ad text to make it a better match for your keyword.
Ad Relevance
Ad relevance is a metric that is again related to your keywords, however in the terms of whether your ad copy is relevant to the keywords in your ad group. For example, keywords like content marketing agency and web designing agency are both relevant to your marketing agency, but if you are using the same ad for both the keywords, you are going to lose out on them staying relevant. This is what ad relevance is aimed at measuring.
If you find out that your ad relevance is below average, you will have to ensure that your keyword groups are not too broad. The more relevant your ad is to your keyword groups, the more likely you are to have a high ad relevance. This is because, for the searcher, this ensures a more valuable campaign experience, which is why it is emphasized in the google ads quality score.
Landing Page Experience
Google measures your user’s experience with your landing page, to know how relevant and useful your website’s landing page will be to the people who click on your ad. To achieve the highest level of personalization such that it also ensures an increase in net sales, you should have individual landing pages for each of your audiences.
Furthermore, targeting factors like behavior and location should be considered while designing your landing page. In the case of keywords, your landing page should not only be related to your ad’s keywords, but rather it should be present in the headline as well as throughout your landing page.
According to Google, a good landing page experience is given when it is clear, useful and related to your keyword and what your customers are searching for. We will be discussing these in detail in this section of the article.
1.Clear: Your landing page should be designed by following the landing page best practices. These practices will involve-
- keeping your conversion ratio 1:1
- using visual hierarchy to guide your users to conversion
- making sure that your landing pages are mostly minimal and skimmable
- the media used should be engaging and informative
- There is a clear way forward through call-to-action
2.Useful: While the design of your landing page matters a lot, so does the content that you offer to your visitors. The content offered by you should be as promised through your ads, as this will help in improving your relationship with potential customers and even encourage returning customers while also improving customer retention.
The content offered by you should be easy to consume and hence can be in the form of info-graphics. It should be devoid of jargon as that can make your visitors abandon your page. The content should also explain to them everything about your offer so that they can decide on whether it is worthy for them or not.
3.Relevant: Your google ads landing page should be redirected such that it does not lead to your website’s homepage or product page or any other page which is not specifically designed for your offer.
Rather, you should ensure that your page is relevant to your offer because the more relevant it is, the more personalized it is found by your visitors. This leads to increased sales, gross profits, improving cash flow and positive customer feedback.
How to Improve Your Google Ads Quality Score?
Your google ads quality score determines where and how often your ads will appear. It is because of this reason that it is important to boost your ratings by consistently working towards it. Your google ads quality score can be improved by improving the relevance of your keywords, ads and landing pages. This can be ensured by directing your efforts in these key areas:
Keyword Research
Keyword research is undertaken to discover new and highly relevant keywords that, on being added to your campaign, will ensure high returns on investment, gross profit and net sales. Such keywords can also help in securing long-tail opportunities, which will contribute to the bulk of your traffic.
Keyword Organization
Once you have found the correct keywords for your ad campaigns, the next step is to differentiate and divide them into tight, organized groups as per each of their ad campaigns.
This differentiation will lead to you getting better rankings in the search results, even without the aid of search engine marketing (SEM). Another benefit of such keyword organization is that you will get relevant crowds for your keywords which will considerably increase your sales, improve customer retention, encourage returning customers and increase your net profits.
Refining Ad Text
One of the best ways of improving your google ads quality score is by running test PPC ad copies for individual ad groups through individual landing pages. The insights that you get through such tests will help you to identify ads that generate higher CTR, and for those which generate lower CTR, you will be able to refine their ad text and therefore improve their google ads quality score.
Such tests will hence help you to identify your marketing attribution, ensure that your landing pages are responsive, helps you to correct your landing page mistakes and discover the best landing page examples for your business and ad campaign.
Optimizing Landing Pages
Improving your google ads quality score can be ensured by following the best landing page practices which involve pointers like having a minimal, uncluttered landing page, knowing the difference between your homepage and landing page, niche of landing pages for different businesses and ad campaigns, improving the landing page loading time, having mobile-friendly landing pages and many more.
Such practices will ensure a cohesive experience for your customers which will lead to positive customer feedback, increased customer loyalty and having a positive balance in favor of operating income over operating expenses. Optimized landing pages also have the benefit of bringing about positive brand awareness which is in line with your brand positioning statement.
Removing Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are those that are preventing your ads from being triggered by a certain word or statement, resulting in your ad not being shown to anyone who is searching for that phrase or word. This is also known as a negative match.
Such keywords are detrimental to your google ads quality score and it is hence very important to continuously research, identify and exclude irrelevant search terms that are wasting your budget. This will therefore help in improving your cash flow and have healthier financial statements like balance sheet, income statement, profit and loss statement and cash flow statement.
Loosen Up the Themes So That Keywords Are Not Very Niche
One of the other popular mistakes committed in an attempt to make keywords more relevant is that they are kept so niche as per the very narrow theme that very few to rare audiences are searching for them. This is must be avoided to improve your google ads quality score.
One of the ways of doing so is by using the opportunities tab in the google ads interface, which helps in finding new keywords relevant to your ad groups. This will help in ensuring that you do not lose your audience even before they have gone through your entire ad on your landing page. This will help improve all your other marketing KPIs.
Loosen Up Restrictive Match Types or Add Broad Match Keywords
In terms of google ads quality score, having keywords that are restrictive to a specific phrase or word, will lead to slow impression growth, and extended reach and frequency times. To avoid this, you should follow a strategic approach that begins with using ad groups and keywords that have the highest CTR.
Analyze Impression Share Data
Impression share represents the percentage of times that your ads were shown out of the total available impressions for which your ads were eligible to appear. If in case your impression share is low, it can be boosted through increasing daily budgets or boosting bids to rank in higher positions. This will hence help in improving your google ads quality score.
Benefits of Improving Google Ads Quality Score
The benefit of improving google ads quality score is that by optimizing your google ads quality score, you will be securing higher returns on investment for yourself. This is because a higher quality score results in lower cost per conversion.
Cost per conversion is different from cost per click in the manner that it's not about how you pay for each click but rather how much you pay when someone takes the action you want them to take. For instance, signing up for a free trial or making a purchase.
Since every click does not result in conversion, cost per conversion is higher than cost per click. However, good google ads quality scores lower both- cost per conversion as well as cost per click.
A higher google ads quality score means that your PPC ad is meeting your potential customers’ needs. The better you are at meeting your potential customer’s needs, the lesser Google will charge you for your ad clicks.
How Can Deskera Assist in Improving Your Google Ads Quality Score?
One of the ways of improving your google ads quality score is by optimizing your landing page and this is where Deskera CRM+ can assist you. Deskera CRM+ is one of that unique software that can do everything “landing page” for you.
This means that whether it is designing your landing page in a minimal, uncluttered and trendy manner, Deskera CRM+ has templates for you to do so, or if you want to design your landing page from scratch, it even supports that. Furthermore, it also facilitates the addition of CTA buttons in the way you want, which if done properly will help in increasing conversions.
Additionally, one of the ways of optimizing your user experience with your landing page is by ensuring that it loads fast, has useful content and is user-friendly across all devices. Deskera CRM+ lets you design your landing page differently across different devices of mobile phones, web and tablets. It also lets you add your content through its platform.
Having an insights dashboard that records the CTA buttons clicked on, or skipped, will also help in giving insights for which pages are optimized and which need to be worked upon. Once worked upon, their google ads quality score improves considerably too.
One of the other ways of improving your google ads quality score is through SEO optimization. Deskera CRM+ facilitates this by letting you add your favicon icon and canonical URL which improves your landing page’s SEO. Deskera CRM+ also lets you make your landing page funnel, through which you can add multiple pages to your existing landing pages.
These pages will help in ensuring keyword relevance, show your usefulness to your customers better and hence improve ad relevance, all of which will collectively improve your google ads quality score.
This funnel also allows linking to your social media accounts, which will improve your digital presence, your brand image and therefore make your ads perform better. Better performing ads will lead to better google ads quality score.
Deskera CRM+ contacts and deal management will also let you engage into targeted and personalized marketing campaigns like email marketing which will have the same benefit as linking your landing pages to social media would have.
Deskera CRM+ hence has it all that will improve your google ads quality score.
Key Takeaways
Google ads quality score is a major deciding factor of how Google decides which ads to show and how to rank them. This makes a good google ads quality score as beneficial as a high bid. This is to the extent that ads with a lower bid, but with higher relevance beat those competitors who are paying more for it.
It is this which makes PPC very appealing as it is no longer only those who are paying more who are succeeding more. However, the factors that determine your google ads quality scores are:
- Expected Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
- Ad Relevance
- Landing Page Experience
Wherein, according to google, a good landing page experience is given when it is:
- Clear
- Useful
- Relevant
This means that your google ads quality score can be improved through:
- Keyword Research
- Keyword Organization
- Refining Ad Text
- Optimizing Landing Pages
- Removing Negative Keywords
- Loosen Up the Themes So That Keywords Are Not Very Niche
- Loosen Up Restrictive Match Types or Add Broad Match Keywords
- Analyze Impression Share Data
Hence, to achieve a high google ads quality score for years to come, put these tactics together while never losing sight of your main business objectives. Combining all will ensure your business reaches where you want it to reach.