What Is A Quality Score, Anyway?
There are a few numbers that hang over our heads throughout our lives:
- Our age
- Our social security numbers
- Our credit scores
The latter plays an important role in our financial security. If you have an unfavorable credit score, you might not qualify for a loan or, if you do, your interest rate might be higher than you’d hoped.
If you understand that basic concept of credit score, then you have at least a workable familiarity of the impact your Quality Score has on your paid search campaigns. When your Quality Score is lacking, your PPC ads won’t perform the way you want.
Google Quality Score
Your Quality Score is the rating Google gives your PPC ads and keywords, based on quality and relevance. Google uses this score to not only determine your cost per click (CPC), but the score is multiplied by your maximum bid to determine your ad rank in the ad auction process.
How Is My Quality Score Determined?
Your Quality Score depends on multiple factors, including:
- Keyword relevance to its specific ad group
- Your click-through rate (CTR)
- The quality and relevance of your landing page
- The quality and relevance of your ad text
- The historical performance of your AdWords account
While Google does a good job masking the weight of each of these factors, we can safely say that your CTR remains the most important component.
That’s because when you get more clicks per view for an ad, Google can safely assume that this ad is relevant and of value to your users. Your reward is a higher ad ranking with lower costs.
Not too shabby.
How To Increase Your Quality Score
When you optimize your Quality Scores, you’ll all but certainly enjoy a higher return on investment, since higher scores = lower cost per conversion.
As a reminder, cost per conversion (as opposed to cost per click) is about how much you pay when someone takes the action you want them to take (sign up for free trial, make a purchase, etc.). Not every click results in a conversion, which is why cost per conversion is generally higher than cost per click; fortunately, a good Quality Score will lower both your cost per click and cost per conversion.
So, how can you optimize your Quality Score to get the best bang for your buck?
- Keywords – Make sure that you seek out new and relevant keywords, particularly long-tail keywords. Then split these keywords into tied, organized groupings that can be connected to individual ad campaigns.
- Take a look at your text – Make sure your ad copy is targeted to your ad groups. We encourage you to test out variations to nail down the perfect messaging.
- Landing pages – Make your landing pages engaging, relevant, and a seamless flow from ad to action.
- Don’t ignore negative keywords – As much time you spend adding new keywords, you should spend that same amount of time identifying and excluding irrelevant search terms that’ll waste your budget. Hint: this should be an ongoing process.
The clients we’ve seen with low AdWords Quality Scores typically suffer these scores because of a disconnect between keywords, ad groups, ad text, and landing page content.
Your Quality Score will organically increase when your AdWords account has a clear keyword structure in place, text that matches specific ad groups, and landing pages that are closely connected to the offer found within the ad text.
Wondering How To Boost Your Quality Score?
The OperationROI team can help. We’ll perform an audit of your existing AdWords account, and identify the areas where changes will have a direct and positive impact on your score. Contact us today at 1-888-277-5429 or by filling out our contact form to learn more.
Quality Score Suffering? Contact Us Today!
