Why is Google Ad Quality Score Important?
If you’ve been running PPC Ads with Google for a while, you might have heard the term ‘Quality Score’ being chatted about in the corners of the web, where digital marketers hang out.
If you’re wondering what it is (and since you’re reading this article, I’ll assume you are) then this is for you. We’ll dive into what it is, why it’s important and — most importantly — how to get a good one. You ready? Let’s go.
What is Quality Score?
It's the score (from 1 - 10) that Google gives keywords depending on how relevant it thinks the keywords are to your ads and landing pages. A higher number means that your ad and landing page are more relevant to the keyword than other advertisers.
Three factors affect it. These are:
Expected CTR – how likely is someone to click on your ad?
Ad relevance – is the ad relevant to the keyword?
Landing page experience – does the landing page correspond to the ad?
Officially, Google says that quality score is not a key performance indicator and is not considered with ad auctions. While this is true, it’s also not strictly the truth – I’ll tell you why in just a little bit.
How is it calculated?
That’s a hard question, mostly because no one really knows – except maybe Google. What we do know is that they use big data and machine learning to measure expected relevance of ads, keywords and landing page to every search.
Why does it matter?
Quality Score is not considered by Google’s algorithm during the bidding process of ads – however, it is a highly accurate indicator of how well your ads will perform. The algorithm takes into account many of the same indicators, so we can use it to find out why an ad isn’t ranking well.
Also, the higher your Quality Score, the less you pay per click. Google said that. That means you maximise profits, which means more money — and who doesn’t like more money?
There is an equation I’ve seen around a bit:
Max Bid * Quality Score = Ad Rank
So, it can affect your position on the search page. It might sound great, but not everyone thinks it still matters – we’ll be looking at a few of the arguments as to why it doesn’t matter any more, below.
How to improve your Quality Score?
You can improve the score by focusing on relevance and user experience with a few key optimisations:
Review keywords and keyword groupings – make sure your keyword groups are very specifically themed. If you sell furniture and you want to do an ad for couches, then don’t put in any keywords about other furniture, for example armchairs or ottomans.
Write ad copy that is highly specific to the keyword groupings — make sure to highlight features.
Review the landing page experience, check that your website is running well and quickly, that the copy on the landing page matches the ad and that it matches searchers’ intent — a high bounce rate is something we do not want!
How to check your Quality Score.
Go to your Google Ad Account
Select the campaign and ad group you want to review
Select Keywords tab
Click on the icon in the status column next to a keyword. The Keyword Analysis field appears. The second section indicates the quality score.
Is Quality Score still useful?
There are two camps of thought – one is pro and the other, you guess it, is anti!
A quick run-down of the Quality Score-no-longer-matters camp:
It’s not actionable
It’s only applicable to search
It doesn’t always correlate with ad performance
Scores are inconsistent.
All of these are, actually, pretty true. More than once I’ve seen a campaign with a good Quality Score underperform and a low Quality Score perform crazily well.
However, I still think it is an important metric to keep in mind. Maybe not to the point of changing a good campaign if it has a low Quality Score, but it gives a good guideline on why your ads may not be performing and how to create higher quality ads more high quality.