Google Ads quality score is an important metric to improve ad performance. How can you improve the quality score and what's a good spot to be in? Learn more here.
Hailey Chong
December 6, 2024
Google Ads is a PPC advertising platform that allows advertisers to show their ads across the Google network which includes search results, ad spaces on websites, and applications. For this blog, we’ll stick to Google search ads and learn how to improve Google ads quality score.
Search ads appear on Google’s search results or on the search engine results page (SERPs) - based on targeted keywords.
This means that when a user searches for something on Google if the keywords are relevant to the ones added to your Google Ads campaign, your ads will show up.
But it’s not exactly that straightforward. Certain factors come into play, including the quality score for your keywords.
But first, let’s look through some of the basics:
When multiple brands compete to show ads for the same keywords, Google Ads uses a bidding algorithm to determine each search ad's rank. While ad relevancy and quality score also affect ranking, let's first understand how bidding works.
Bidding is for you to help Google Ads understand your goals or objectives for the campaign. This helps optimize your campaigns and improve the results you see over time.
Your bidding strategy falls into one of the following categories, which helps Google Ads understand your priorities:
Google Ads offers a wide range of bidding strategies to choose from based on your goals or objectives. Read here for more details.
Google search ads work on the idea of Keyword targeting, which means that you get to define which keywords you want your ads to show for and bid on them accordingly. You can also define for which keywords do you not want your ads to show using negative keywords.
Also, the keywords you want to target might not always have the right search volume or users are not searching for these keywords.
This entails conducting keyword research using tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner, Google Trends, Spyfu, Semrush, etc., to understand the relevancy of keywords, CPC for these keywords, volume, and deciding which keywords would you be likely to rank for.
After you’ve narrowed the list into highly targeted or relevant keywords, there are 3 match types that Google allows for search ads:
Exact match: These are keywords that Google will only show your ad for if the search query exactly matches the keyword or has the same meaning.
If your keyword is shoes for 5 year olds, then your ads will appear for searches matching exactly with it e.g. shoes for 5-year-olds, shows for five year olds, etc.
Phrase match: These are keywords that Google will show your ad for if the search query contains the keywords you want to rank for or if the meaning is implied.
For the same keyword example, your ads will appear for searches including the keyword as a part of the entire phrase e.g. affordable shoes for 5 year olds, shoes for 5 year olds near me, etc.
Broad match: These are the keywords that Google will show your ad for even if the search query loosely matches the keywords you want to rank for including synonyms, related keywords, and variations.
Your ads will appear for all the searches that loosely match the intent of the keyword e.g. kids’ shoes, toddler shoes near me, buy children's shoes online, etc.
There are other targeting options to streamline your search ad campaigns:
Audience:
You can choose categories of audiences to whom you’d like to show your ads. For example, if your product is specific for people in hospitality, you can narrow down your ad campaigns to those specific audiences.
Observation:
You can choose to set an audience for observation i.e. the ads will not limit your reach to a narrowed audience and help you observe how different users are responding to these ads.
Targeting:
This way, the ads will be limited to the audience you define. This is recommended only if you know your target audience well. Otherwise, you end up missing out on potential clicks and conversions.
Retargeting:
You can choose to show your ads to users who have interacted with your ads before, create audience segments, and install tracking to retarget users who visited your website before.
This significantly increases the chances of conversions as users are already in the funnel.
Time and location:
You can choose to show your ads only to users in a specific location or users searching in that location despite not being there.
This can be helpful if you only provide products or services in particular regions. Similarly, you can also select what time would you like to show the ads i.e. day of the week, time of the day, etc.
Devices:
You can choose to show your ads only on the device that is more relevant to what you’re selling. For example, if you’re trying to advertise a mobile app, you wouldn’t want your ads to show for laptop users.
When you start running your campaigns, Google learns about your services, ad targeting, and how users are interacting with your ads. Through these understandings, Google Ads determines your ad relevancy, performance, and most importantly, the quality score. Let’s talk about it.
Quality score is a metric Google Ads analyzes to determine the quality of your ads.
The quality score of your ads will help determine what your ads and your landing pages are lacking. You can leverage this to improve your ads and stand your ground against competitors while not necessarily spending too much.
That’s right! A higher quality score means your ads are more relevant for users so your ads get preference and can potentially rank higher for a lower CPC.
This won’t just help optimize your budget but also improve website visits and conversions.
Quality score is measured on a scale of 1-10 and is available at a keyword level i.e. you can view the quality score for individual keywords indicating how relevant the ads and landing page content are for each keyword.
Quality score is usually calculated based on 3 factors:
A higher expected CTR means your ads are more likely to get clicked.
A higher ad relevance means there’s a clear match between your ads and user search intent.
And, a better landing page experience indicates relevance between ad copies and page content.
These factors collectively contribute to a quality score.
When you have a higher quality score, you potentially pay less Cost-per-Click (CPC) for the same keyword. This is why aiming for a better quality score can give you more returns on your budget than keywords with a lower quality score.
However, a quality score of 10 can be extremely hard to obtain and time-consuming. You should aim for a quality score of 8 and if you can achieve anything more than that, good for you! A quality score of 8 or above indicates that your ads and landing pages are relevant to users.
Keep in mind, that there can be factors like industry competition, keyword volume and demand, etc., that could subjectively affect what quality score is considered good enough to not worry about it.
On the other hand, a lower quality score (less than 5) indicates that there’s a mismatch between your keywords, ad copies, and landing pages.
This gap means that your ads are not relevant to users and as a result, Google does not prioritize them for auctions and your CPC increases for the same keywords.
Let’s take a look at what a lower quality score can mean for your campaigns and ads.
Nobody wants to pay more for something that you can pay less for.
A bad quality score means that you pay more for bids that your competitors have to pay less for. This happens because Google sees your ads to be less relevant than others and charges you more for showing on ad positions.
Your ads don’t get preference in rankings if your quality score is low. They might not show on SERPs frequently and pushed to lower ad positions due to low relevancy.
You can increase your budget or bid more for keywords but that’s not an ideal method for long-term advertising.
Sooner or later, your ads will continue suffering as the performance deteriorates, the quality score drops, and they become infrequent to non-existent.
Your quality score is a product of the above-mentioned 3 factors. Therefore, to improve the quality score, you need to improve the factors affecting it.
CTR is the measure of how effective your ad is in terms of the likelihood of a user clicking on it and ad relevance is the measure of how relevant your ads and keywords are to each other.
Let’s see how you can improve them.
A straightforward way of thinking about improving CTR is to put yourself in the shoes of your users.
When you search for something on Google, which results are you most likely to click? The one that feels most relevant or closely related to your search.
What people search for and what you write in the ad copies need to have a very strong correlation in order to increase the chances of people clicking. When that happens, CTR increases.
Better copy implies better expected CTR. A good way to go about this is to experiment and test ad copies by duplicating ad assets, making changes to copies, adding more targeted keywords in your ads, and organizing them into groups.
And that brings us to our next point.
Google Ads lets you define different ad groups within a campaign and each ad group can be specific to a particular feature or service you’re advertising for.
As an example: say you offer a product that offers automation and integration solutions. It would be more targeted if you narrowed down these offerings into separate ad groups along with specific keywords and ad copies for each.
This way of organizing will enable you to craft extremely targeted ads that not only have high search intent but also improve ad relevance along with CTR.
Your landing page experience is the last piece of that puzzle that completes how quality score is evaluated.
Showing your ad on SERPs is the first challenge and getting users to click on it is the second. After a user lands on your page, their expectation that is piqued when they click on the ad needs to be met.
The landing page experience is about the overall experience of a user when they click on your ad. This includes page load time, navigation, responsiveness, design, elements, relevance, copies, and even CTAs.
What can contribute to a bad landing page experience?
What should you do?
Basically, it is the opposite of what we discussed above:
Google Search Ads are text ads on search results that let you reach people while they’re searching on Google for the products and services you offer.
Google Search Ads work on a bidding system. When users enter a search query, Google runs an auction, where your ad competes with others for a spot on the search results page. The position of your ad depends on factors like your bid amount, the relevance of your ad to the search term, and your ad's quality score. You only pay when a user clicks on your ad, hence the term 'pay-per-click' (PPC). Popular paid search platforms include Google Ads and Microsoft (Bing) Ads. This article will focus on Google Search Ads.
Start with a smaller budget to test different ads and adjust based on performance data.
To create a paid search ad, set up an account with Google. Conduct keyword research to identify relevant search terms, create your ad, and set a daily ad budget.
But let’s admit something - even after running ads, sometime you might not see the expected growth.
There are so many factors that influence ad performance - quality score is just one out of many things you have to keep in mind while building a paid marketing campaign.
We get it–paid advertising isn’t as easy as it looks. That’s why we exist.