“Are you looking to enhance your Quality Score? Discover how understanding this crucial metric can impact your Google Ads campaigns.”
The article sheds light on the significance of comprehending and keeping a close eye on the quality score within Google Ads campaigns. Google’s quality score functions as an assessment of the appropriateness of keywords, advertisements, and landing pages, thereby exerting a substantial influence on the efficacy of an advertising initiative. A high quality score, typically 7 or above for non-brand keywords, holds the potential to elevate search result rankings, boost visibility, and reduce cost per click in comparison to competitors.
It is recommended that advertisers concentrate on keywords that offer substantial value while disregarding those with low quality scores, as the latter might not deliver the desired outcomes. Factors that mold the quality score include the relevance of the ad, the estimated click-through rate, and the quality of the landing page. Google also takes into account the overall historical performance of an account to gauge an advertiser’s consistency and quality.
By staying abreast of the quality score and grasping its ramifications, advertisers can fine-tune their campaigns to enhance their performance. For those seeking improvement and expert guidance, collaborating with a certified agency could be a beneficial step.
How do you know if you meet all of Google’s performance criteria? Even if Google indicates how it perceives relevance, this doesn’t mean that everyone’s interpretation is the right one. It also doesn’t mean that advertisers’ choices are the right ones, let alone that Google will positively consider their suggestions for keywords, ads or landing pages. In order to mitigate any uncertainty, there is a metric that can allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of your Google Ads campaign: the quality score.
What is a quality score?
A quality score is a score out of 10, provided by Google at the level of each keyword, that evaluates the relevance of the keyword in question. It determines how well a keyword responds to users’ queries, its purpose, the appeal of all associated ads and the effectiveness of your landing page.
Why should you pay attention to your quality score?
There are many good things about Google—but offering free visibility to advertizers is one of them. This is the real issue of the quality score.
Imagine you are an advertizer and have just launched a campaign on Google (it shouldn’t take too much effort). You will pay every time someone clicks on your ad. But what happens if no one does? Your ad still gets clicks and is still visible in the search results. This means that even if no one clicks on our ad, visibility will still be there. Google is not really inclined to make its advertizers take advantage of visibility for free. Therefore, it rates the performance of the campaigns. From there, the advertizers with the highest performing ads usually win out.
What is a good quality score?
A good quality score is considered to be any score equal to or greater than 7 out of 10 for non-brand related keywords. For such keywords, a score of 10 is hardly achievable. Generally speaking, for non-brand related keywords, your goal is 7. For brand-related keywords, you should have a score of 10.
However, keep in mind that:
1) A Google campaign’s ultimate goal is a high conversion rate
2) Google works in theory and rarely (never) in practice
Basically, if a keyword provides you with much value (whether in revenue or completed forms) but has a low quality score—ignore it.
What are the advantages of a good quality score?
Having a good quality score leads to 3 major advantages:
Source: metricool
If you don’t have a good quality score, Google will be less inclined to give you impressions as the ads might rank you poorly in the search results. This will generate a much higher CPC cost.
What factors influence the quality score?
Always keep in mind how Google works to understand how it rates campaigns. Google is used by people looking for a solution. These people use queries to search online for an answer to their problem. Advertizers position themselves on certain keywords to attract people to their solution via an ad. From there, they want to convert that person by offering them a landing page experience that they hope will be positive.
Since all of these factors merge together, Google takes into account all of them.
Your ad’s relevance: Google examines whether your ad is contextually relevant; in other words, if it is consistent with user queries and if the keywords generated clicks. If your ad has received clicks based on the query “dog collar,” but your ad is about a “diamond collar,” chances are that your ad will have little relevance in this context.
Your estimated click-through rate (CTR): An important consideration is the word “estimated.” Google compares your actual CTR to what it thinks it should be based on the keywords you are using. It is therefore possible that you are satisfied with your CTR compared to other campaigns; however, Google may still believe that your ratio is not good enough for its estimate.
Your landing page quality: Google analyzes whether your landing page effectively responds to users’ initial queries. The issue here is quality, not performance. This means that your conversion rate and associated metrics are not taken into account in the quality of your landing page—according to Google.
Google also factors in your overall historical account performance to determine whether you are
consistently a good advertizer. Google wants to make sure you are not simply enjoying some beginner’s luck. Of course, there are other factors in the equation, but Google is careful not to reveal them.
Finally, it is possible to analyze your quality score in order to know your strong points and the ones you need to work on optimizing. Google will let you know if your quality score is below average, average or above average. From there, you’ll be well on your way to optimizing your campaigns.
For some help in the field or simply to hire a certified agency, contact us!