Your Google Ads quality score matters, and it highly contributes to the success of your Google Ads campaigns. Scored out of ten, it looks at three factors and is a great way to determine what you need to improve upon in order to efficiently utilise your campaign budget. We want to help you understand how to improve your google ads quality score and optimise your Google Ads campaigns.
What Are The Factors That Affect My Quality Score?
The Google Ads quality score is calculated by three components:
- Expected click-through rate
- Ad relevance
- Landing page experience
All three factors are highly important to get right but they all go hand in hand and all equally need to be optimised. This will not just affect your quality score but the overall performance of your ads too. In order to improve your Google Ads quality score, you must understand what the three factors are.
Expected Click-Through Rate
The expected click-through rate (eCTR) is the likelihood that your ad will be clicked when shown on the search engine results page (SERP). Google looks at the historical performance of a keyword and measures the probability of your ad being clicked on if it is shown for specific keywords in those search terms. It will also look at the quality of your ad text, what you’re offering and how engaging the ad is. Similar to the quality score for keywords, there’s a quality score for your ad copy. Reviewing if your ad is poor, average, good or excellent will see what you can do to improve your ad and the eCTR. You can look at competitors’ ads to see what to write, include your unique selling points (USPs), create engaging headlines and tell them what the action they should take is (‘get a quote today’).
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It affects your quality score in seeing if your ad is relevant enough to bring in those clicks to a great landing page. The expected click-through rate should naturally improve when the ad is relevant to a search query. This leads us to ad relevance.
Ad Relevance
Ad relevance is a determining factor in the success of your campaigns and the more relevant an ad is to the keyword the more impressions, clicks and conversions it could generate.
When a user searches a query, Google wants to show an ad that is closely connected to the query subject and that they know the user is likely to click on. As well as that, having an ad that answers a search query or matches the search intent with a product, blog, event or service benefits you as a business by bringing the correct people to your page to convert into customers.
Segmenting your keywords into ad groups improves ad relevance by grouping similar keywords together with ad text that specifically answers and matches the intent of the user’s search query. Everything included such as headlines, display URLs, extensions and descriptions will be more relevant to a user. A search query for a girl’s private school will match best to an ad with the headline ‘Girl’s Private School’, instead of a generic ‘Independent School’ headline.
Bringing in good relevancy to the ads will create a better quality score, as well as boost the eCTR and get to the top of the SERPs.
Landing Page Experience
The landing page experience is the next step in the customer journey and will see it to a potential conversion, so it’s vital to give an easy and enjoyable experience for the user. Again, the landing page experience is also linked in with the eCTR and the ad relevance. When someone clicks on your ad, they will want to be taken directly to what is being advertised. If you’re advertising running shoes, take the user to the page on your site that just has running shoes- don’t take them to a generic page with all types of shoes.
Better landing pages will also improve your ad rank, which will see you higher up in the SERPs for high intent traffic and an increase in the eCTR. Everything works together, and all are important for heading towards a great quality score.
To sum up, the landing page experience, aim to limit the number of clicks from a user clicking on your ad to clicking on ‘pay now’ or ‘get a quote here’ to create an awesome landing page experience. Get a quote from our conversion rate optimisation specialists today, to see how we can transform your landing page experience.
Your Mobile Quality Score
Your Mobile Ad Quality Score is calculated the same way as your Desktop Quality Score. Google uses the distance between the user and your business to calculate the quality score for mobile.
The score is different because mobile users will have a different experience. Although the ad is the same, the landing page experience will be different. Your website should be mobile responsive in order to encourage an easy journey around your site.
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However, if you think that you are doing well on all three aspects, and your mobile quality score is down, try separating the campaigns for desktop ads and mobile ads. Although the ads are the same, you will see a change in quality score for either device type.
Why Does My Quality Score Matter?
Google Ads uses machine learning and will evaluate your campaigns to see if they are of a high enough quality to be shown within the paid advertising section of the SERPs. Quality score will also help you as a business or digital marketer, not just Google using their algorithm for their benefit. You want to be relevant to people’s searches so that they click through to your site and then can easily navigate around your site to do what you want them to do. So not only do you get a better ad rank on the SERP but you follow the customer along in their journey to end at your business, rather than any competitors’.
A high-quality score positively affects your budget use, utilising it in the best way and generating quality leads and conversions.
How Do I Find My Quality Score?
The quality score is found with your keywords, in your Google Ads account.
So once you are in Google ads, find keywords on the left-hand side and it will then show data for your different keywords, such as impressions and clicks. To view your quality score, you will need to create a custom column.
In order to do that go to columns > modify columns > quality score (a dropdown) > select ‘quality score’, ‘exp.CTR’, ‘landing page exp.’ and ‘ad relevance’.
For the three components, Google scores it either ‘above average’, ‘average’ or ‘below average’ and this will determine your quality score out of ten. Going on from this, you can then focus your attention on anything that is not ‘above average’.
What Is A Good Quality Score?
Of course, anything in Google Ads really varies between accounts, campaign types and your industry. So a good quality score depends on what type of keyword it is.
For a branded keyword (‘brand name’) you should aim for between 8 and 10. A high-intent commercial keyword (‘running shoes on sale’) is between 7 and 9. Finally, a low intent keyword (‘free…’) is 7/10.
Altogether, avoid having your eCTR, ad relevance and landing page experience at ‘below average’ at least. It may not be achievable immediately to have it all ranked ‘above average’ due to no specific landing pages, for example, but it’s good to aim high!
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To conclude, a great quality score depends on three factors: expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. But of course, optimisation doesn’t stop there, there are many other things to consider when building and optimizing your campaigns.
So if it all seems too much to do, let us do the hard work for you! Our PPC team are experts in Google Ads, and our CRO and Web team are able to optimise your landing pages for you. We will help improve your Google Ads quality score and show you the potential your Google Ads campaigns have. Contact us today.
We provide Google Ads services for a variety of different business sectors. Whether you’re looking for Google Ads services for Wedding Venues, Events, Law Firms and many more, we have Google Ads specialists to help you improve your online presence.
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