What Is Quality Score & What You Can Do To Improve it

If you’re new to Google Ads, one of the first things you need a solid understanding of is Quality Score. Your Quality Score has a massive impact on the costs and effectiveness of your paid search campaigns. 

What is Quality Score? 

Quality Score is Google’s rating of the quality and relevance of your ads and keywords. It’s used to determine your CPC and how well your ad will rank in the ad auction process. 

Your Quality Score is determined by the following factors:

• Your expected click-through rate (CTR) 
• Ad relevance 
• Landing page experience

Benefits of improving your Quality Score

At RankingCo we’ve worked with a number of amazing PPC accounts, so we know first hand that Quality Score has a direct correlation to the success of Google Ads. Improving your Quality Score helps maximise your ad budget, thus achieving more results with less spend. 

A high Quality Score is Google’s way of saying your ad meets your potential customers’ needs. The better you are at meeting these needs, the less Google will charge you for the ad click. 

Fine-tune your ads and landing page to get a higher Quality Score 

Improving your CTR 

Your expected CTR is an estimation of how likely someone will want to click on your ad when it appears for one of your chosen keywords. 

There are three different statuses:

• “Average” or “Above Average”- meaning there is no significant problem with your keywords expected CTR 
• “Below Average”- this means your keyword is expected to underperform poorly in terms of CTR

If one of your keywords gets a “below average” status, you might want to think about changing your ad copy associated with the keyword. This is why creating two or more ads per ad group becomes useful. You can incorporate more than one of your preferred keywords in each ad and improve your expected CTR. 

Aside from redoing your ad copy, consider removing any keywords that people aren’t really searching for, or add a wider variety of keywords to your ad groups. 

Improve Ad relevance 

Another way of improving your Quality Score is your ad relevance. This is to how well your keyword matches the message portrayed in your ad. A good ad informs your potential customers what value your business can bring them. This includes a compelling CTA message that appeals to all users and their devices. 

Just like your CTR,  your ad relevance is ranked by the same three statuses: Average, Above Average and Below Average. 

Improving your landing page experience

When you’re looking at improving the Quality Score of your keywords, it’s recommended that you compare them to the copy on your landing page. 

Keep in mind that your landing page needs to be useful to the person who clicks on your ad. It should be well organised and have text that relates to what that person is searching for. 

If your potential customer clicks on your ad, only to be redirected to a landing page that doesn’t match that person's search term, this won’t be useful to them. 

Alternatively, if you bombard your potential customers with pop-ups or have a slow-loading landing page, you’re hurting their customer’s user experience and forcing them to exit your landing page. 

Keep your landing page well organised, with everything your searcher needs. Don’t forget to include helpful information, related links and contact information. 

Improving your Quality Score greatly maximises your ad budget and achieves more results with less spend, so it is important to pay attention to it. 

Feeling a little lost with Google Ads? 

At RankingCo, our team of certified Google managers have the knowledge and experience to create Google Ads strategies designed around your businesses goals and needs. We take the complexity out and offer a human approach to digital marketing. Get in contact with us today and see how we can help you grow your business online.