How can you enhance the Quality Score of your Google Ads campaigns? This article delves into strategies for understanding and boosting the quality score of your Google Ads campaigns. This score, rated out of 10 by Google, evaluates a keyword’s suitability to match a user query, based on the ad and landing page alignment. Factors influencing the quality score encompass ad relevance, landing page experience, and estimated click rate. It’s crucial to note that historical account performance and other undisclosed elements also play a role.
A quality score exceeding 7 is deemed excellent, leading to advantages like higher search result rankings, increased impressions, and reduced CPC. Recommendations for elevating the quality score comprise optimizing ads with primary keywords, improving click-through rates through expanding negative keyword lists, and refining landing pages with relevant keywords and enhanced loading speed.
It is advised to target enhancing below-average factors initially, disregarding keywords with minimal impressions, and assessing the impact of pausing keywords with low quality scores. Additionally, seeking professional guidance or reaching out to the source for further support in boosting Google Ads campaign quality scores is suggested.
Understanding the quality score for your Google Ads campaigns is one thing. Improving it is a whole other ballgame. Remember that the quality score is a score out of 10, calculated and provided by Google, in order to judge the ability of a keyword to answer a user query according to an ad and landing page. The three main factors that enter into the calculation of the quality score are:
- The relevance of your ad
- The experience provided by the landing page
- The estimated click rate
Please note that Google always looks at the historical performance of your account. It also considers other factors in its calculation that unfortunately remains a secret.
Google then uses the scores given to the keywords of its advertizers as a key performance indicator on which it will base itself to offer (or not) several advantages: a better position in the search results, a higher volume of impressions, a lower CPC for a given keyword, etc. As long as your quality score is greater than or equal to 7 out of 10, your ads are in check.
In the event that you wish to improve your quality score (and you should!), you first need to determine on which aspect you should focus. For this, Google gives you the answer since each factor has its own score (or rather its own approximation): “above average,” “average,” and “below average.” You will gain more from improving your KPIs that are “below average” to “average” rather than moving those that are “average” to “above average.”
Finally, before proceeding, make sure you base your analyses on keywords that have received enough impressions. You can therefore skip the keywords labelled as having low volume as well as those with less than 300 total impressions.
1- Optimize your ads
Remember that the purpose of your ad is to encourage clicks by providing potential customers a solution to the problem they are searching for.
- Make sure you have several versions of the ad in your campaign so that you keep only the most successful ones.
- Include your main keyword in the text of your ad (sparingly though, as this can also work to your disadvantage if Google feels that you are trying to cram keywords into your content).
- Give enough clear and useful information to generate interest.
For further ad optimization, please refer to our articles “How to write an effective ad for Google” and “9 tips to improve your Google ads.”
2- Improve your click-through rate
The click-through rate (CTR) is not a metric to be taken lightly. By a simple calculation (clicks divided by impressions, for those who wondered how it is calculated), it is possible to analyze several trends. The CTR allows you to evaluate the link between your keyword and your ad (are you positioning yourself on the right words, are the intentions of the keywords aligned with your objectives, etc.). It also allows you to judge whether your ads’ copywriting is effective (the ad is appealing, the arguments in the ad are compelling, etc.).
3- Optimize your landing page
Ultimately, your landing page is the natural extension of your ad; therefore, it should provide a solution to people’s queries.
- Determine the keywords that generate the highest bounce rates. To do this, you will need to link your Google Ads account to your Google Analytics account.
- Include your main keywords in the content of your landing page.
- Work on the loading speed of your landing page.
- Do not use a generic page (your home page, for example). Instead, create themed pages for each of your campaign’s segments.
- Make sure you have enough useful content to allow people to actually consider your offer (and convert!).
- Check that your site is secure and easy to navigate.
4- What to do with low-quality score keywords?
The real question is: do these keywords generate conversions and therefore value?
Yes: Don’t touch anything. You don’t want to touch what Google considers, in theory only, to be “less relevant,” if it works in reality for you.
No: Try to improve your quality score as best as you can. If, after that, your score doesn’t increase, pause keywords that have a score of 3 or less only.
Be careful though: you want to evaluate the impact this action will have by first looking at how many clicks these keywords generate so that you don’t cut off too much of your traffic at once.
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