Google Ads Quality Score: All You Need To Know 2021 Plus How To Improve Your Score

Introduction – Google Ads Quality Score: All You Need To Know 2021 Plus How To Improve Your Score

Today in Digital Marketing, advertisers are often concerned with the performance of their campaigns. They want to get the best results for the money they’ve invested (ROAS).

They want to pay as little as possible to get a click on their ads (CPC/CPA) and when they do they want to have as many visitors as possible take the brave step to become leads and customers (Conversions/CTR).

They become obsessed with terms like Returns On Ad Spend (ROAS), Cost Per Click (CPC), Click Through Rate (CTR), Cost Per Lead (CPL), and much more.

Today in this blog post, we want to help you learn how to get the best results possible from your Google Ads campaigns by optimizing your Google Ads Quality Score.

In this article, we’ll talk about what Google Ads Quality Score is and why it matters.

We’ll also teach you how to interpret your own Google Ads Quality Scores and how to improve them so you can get the best results on your Google Ads investment!

Download Our Free eBook

What Is A Google Ads Quality Score?

Google has stated that your Quality Score can be a valuable tool when improving your ad performance.

Your quality score can give you ways to improve your ads, keywords, and landing pages.

But, what is a Quality Score in your Google Ads account?

Your Google Ads Quality Score is a metric that Google uses to determine how well ads in google search results are performing. The higher the quality score, the better google deems your ad to be and will give it a higher position on Google’s search engine result page (SERP).

One of the reasons why Google is so popular, the most popular search engine and website on the planet with an estimated 4.5 billion searches per day at the last report by Skai.io , is because of how well they do what they do: provide the best results and answers for their searchers.

This is true even if you are running Google Ads: Google will show the best performing ad to their searchers and the top performer will get the best results and most traffic.

Google will give the best user experience possible to their users at all times and that means they will reward, or give an advantage, to advertisers (and other websites for that matter) with the best performing ads with the highest quality and relevancy to their user’s search.

It’s a relationship where Google rewards your hard work with lower costs and better results (will be explained in the next section).

Google will assess the quality of your ad by assessing 5 different factors. These different factors will directly influence your quality score and will be discussed in detail further in the article.

The way that Google arrives at the quality score of your campaign depends not only on these 5 factors but also on the quality of the keywords that you use for your campaigns.

Keyword quality is a rating that depends greatly on the one metric that Google values above all: user experience. Additionally, keywords with more relevancy, quality, and higher quality landing pages will be given a higher quality score than those of a competitor that is performing poorly.

Now that we know what your Quality Score is let us explore why it is important for your ad performance and the success of your overall Google Ads campaigns.

Why Is Your Google Ads Quality Score Important?

Your google ads quality score is important for two reasons.

First, the higher your google ad’s quality score, the better google deems the quality and relevance of your Google Ad and will give you a higher position on the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

This means that Google users are more likely to click on an ad with a high Google Ads Quality Score.

The second reason why your Google Ads Quality Score is important is that Google Ads are Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns.

A Pay Per Click campaign is a type of advertising campaign where the advertiser pays google each time google users click on the advertisement. This means that you will only pay every time your Google Ads gets a click and moves you closer to getting a conversion.

The reason why this is important to your Google Ads performance is that it means that a higher Quality Score will result in lower pay per click costs for you. With lower pay-per-click costs, you will get more conversions for your campaign at a better price (lower cost).

In other words, a lower cost per click will give you more results for the same ad budget.

Now that we understand two reasons why your Google Ads Quality Score is important let us learn how to interpret your quality score rating.

This step will help you understand the quality of your ads and analyze if there needs to be optimization of your Google Ads for better performance.

How To Understand Your Quality Score Rating

Each keyword in your Google Ads account is given a starting quality score of 6.

This is where all your keywords will start but your score will increase or decrease depending on the performance of Google’s ranking factors that influence your quality score.

Your quality score will range from 1 to 10 with 10 being the best rating while 1 is absolutely abysmal and will need some work.

The good news is that there are things that you can do to improve your quality score. We will discuss those in the next section.

What Are The Factors That Influence Your Quality Score?

Google has stated that your quality score should be used as a general indicator of which areas of your ads you need to focus on for better ad quality and results rather than a score that you need to optimize at every turn.

This helps to make our job as advertisers a lot easier because now we know what to focus on – improving the areas of our ads that our quality score shows us needs improvement.

But what are the areas of our ad that we need to work on?

There are 5 areas that Google has outlined that can be improved to get better ad performance and a better quality score. They are:

1. Your Quality Score Components
2. Improving Ad-Keyword Relevancy
3. Improving Your Click Through Rate
4. Optimizing Your Landing Page
5. Using Your Quality Score With Other Metrics

Google has outlined the following five factors that influence your google ads quality score.

The one thing you need to understand is, google wants you (the advertiser) to have a successful campaign so they will try to reward advertisers with high Quality Scores and penalize those with low scores.

There are two ways Google does this:

1. By putting your ads in higher positions on search engine result pages
2. Charging you a lower cost per click for your ads with a higher score or quality while other PPC campaigns might get charged more per click because their Quality Score (and by extension their ad campaigns) is not good.

No. 1 Your Click-Through Rate

Getting a better Click Through Rate on your ad campaigns is a powerful signal to Google that your ad is generating views from the Search Engine Results Pages.

Click Through Rate in digital marketing is the percentage of people who see your google ads and then click on them to visit the landing page you are promoting.

The more clicks that happen, the better CTR (Click Through Rate) score will be for your google ads campaign. It is a measurement of how well Google Ads campaigns convert visitors into leads/sales by tracking which visitors from Google search results clicked on an ad

It’s important because higher CTR rates lead to lower cost-per-click prices for advertisers!

This means that even if two keywords have different quality scores, they can still have different costs depending on their respective Click-Through Rates. This goes back to what we talked about in our first section – Quality Score should not always dictate all decisions around budgeting or ad optimization.

Your “Expected Click Through Rate” (Exp. CTR) will tell how likely it is that Google searchers will click your ad.

Google has given us a list of steps you can take to improve your expected Click Through Rate if the rating is “Below average” or “Average.”

Some of these include:

1. Being more specific in your ad text
2. Improving the copywriting of your ads to speak more directly to your ideal customers
3. Experiment with different Calls To Actions and your landing page
4. Split-testing everything to find the best ad possible
5. Give a better and harder to resist offer to your ideal customers

There are many ways that you can improve your Click Through Rate that we will be discussing in the upcoming steps.

However, you may read the full list of recommendations that Google gives by visiting this article.

No. 2 Ad Quality, Ad Relevance, And Landing Page

This point is a big one since it covers three critical areas relevant to your ad success: your ad quality, ad relevance, and landing page quality.

Let us look at all three points briefly below.

No. 2.1 Your Ad Quality

Your ad quality is a combination of all the different components that make up your ad. A high ad quality will come from optimizing the individual components that make up your ad.

These components include all the factors being addressed in this section plus:

1. Ad images used
2. Website/Landing page optimization
3. Keyword relevancy
4. Historical Click Through Rate
5. Conversion rate
6. Your Call To Action
7. Split testing to find the best performing ad

There are many ways to improve the quality of your Google Ad. You can learn more by watching the video below:

No. 2.2 Your Ad Relevance

Google has described Ad Relevance as showing how relevant your ads are to the keywords you’re targeting.

Ad relevance is important because the more relevant your ads are, the higher google’s quality score will be for that particular ad because higher ad relevance will result in a better click through rate and better ad performance.

When writing an ad campaign it is important to match your keywords with what you want to provide to potential customers on a landing page as closely as possible.

This will ensure that when a searcher reads your ad and clicks on it they will know immediately (in less than 2.5 seconds) that they have come to the right place and that where they are they can have their problems solved.

If Google determines that your ad is not relevant or appropriate then their algorithm might penalize you by giving a lower Quality Score rating and/or lowering its position in search engine results pages.

A few things you can do to improve your Ad-Keyword relevance is:

1. Ensuring you speak the language your ideal customer will use and understand. That might mean not using any industry jargon that beginners or inexperienced searchers might not know if you are targeting beginners or using a lot of jargon that only seasoned veterans and experts would know if you are interested in working with professionals.
2. Ensure the text on your ad is matched by or related to popular search terms
3. Grouping your keywords into themes to increase relevance.
   
   Themes can be based on products, services, categories, or even specific niches. For example, if you sell sports team jerseys then separating ‘Football jerseys’ from ‘Basketball jerseys’ might be a good start but you might also need to go a bit further and group by Gender as well.
4. Using ad groups to your advantage by finding keywords that can’t be easily addressed by the same ad. You would split these keywords into smaller ad groups until you arrive at a common theme among keywords that makes grouping possible

No. 2.3 Your Landing Page

The quality of your landing page is one of the most important factors in determining the success of your ad campaigns.

One of the most serious mistakes we repeatedly see Do-It-Yourself advertisers, business owners, and lazy digital marketers commit is that they tend to create the perfect ad with the best targeting, keywords, and ad quality.

They are getting a lot of traffic and are ranked in the top positions of the Search Engine Results Pages but then they make the grave mistake of running all their traffic to a generic website page like their website’s home page or services page.

This is terrible! This will kill the performance of your ads and send your conversions through the floor in an instant. Don’t do it!

The way to get better results from your Google Ads is by having a dedicated landing page for all your offers.

A dedicated landing page for your offers will improve your conversions because it will be designed to speak to the type of traffic that your ad is generating (cold, warm, or hot traffic).

It will also be a more relevant results page that corresponds to what the user has searched in Google.

For example: if a user has searched for Nike Air Jordan shoes and land on a page with Addidas, Puma, and Under Armour sneakers, and not a dedicated landing page with only Air Jordan sneakers, then they might leave your website without searching for what they want.

By sending your traffic to an optimized landing page you will be able to optimize your web page for conversions, generating leads, and generating sales.

You can use the free resources we have provided below to learn more about improving your website’s conversion rates.

1. Hard Conversions And Soft Conversions Explained: 10 Powerful Tips To Get More Conversions
2. 16 Awesome Ways To Do Digital Marketing For Local Businesses
3. Website Traffic Guide: How To Convert Cold, Warm, And Hot Traffic
4. Lead Generation Complete Guide: From Basic To 5 Powerful Strategies
5. Email Marketing to Grow Your Business: 15 Powerful Conversion Tips
6. 3 Effective Sign-up Drip Campaigns for Effective Email Marketing Conversions

No. 3 Using Ad Extensions

An ad extension in Google is an additional piece of information about your business, phone numbers, links to specific pages, etc.

Using as many extensions as possible will help you to improve the quality and conversion rate of your Google ads because searchers will have more relevant and helpful information about your business.

Additionally, you will be able to allow multiple forms of the conversion right from the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).

For example; you might have an ad that leads to a dedicated landing page but allows your searchers to hit the ‘Call’ extension right from the SERPs and call your business to take advantage of a special offer.

By using as many extensions as possible Google will have more data to use when calculating your quality score.

They will improve your quality score, conversions, cost per lead (CPL), and even your click through rate.

Conclusion – Google Ads Quality Score: All You Need To Know 2021 Plus How To Improve Your Score

In this post, we have looked at factors that will influence your Google Ads quality score. We have learned about your quality score and why it is important for your ad ranking and advertisement success.

If you have any questions about this article then leave a comment below in the comment section. We try to answer all our comments!

If you have a need for better Google Ads campaigns and want to improve the results of your Google Ads then feel free to set up a free consultation with our team.

We’d be happy to help you grow your business online.