How To Use Google’s Quality Score to Enhance Your PPC Campaigns
Google’s Quality Score is pretty important in the success of your paid search marketing campaigns. In fact, Google has made it pretty clear that this Quality Score is used to determine which ads will show up on pages for organic searches – and where they’ll show up. Furthermore, the higher the Quality Score, the less you’ll have to pay per click, so trying to get the highest possible Quality Score for each of your keywords should be one of your top priorities.
How Does Quality Score Work?
The Google Quality Score is an estimate of the relevancy of your ads, keywords, and landing page, to the person who is conducting a search. Beyond keyword choices, the number of clicks your ad receives also impacts your score (as the more people click, the more likely your ad was found relevant). The higher the Quality Score (10 being the highest on a scale of 1 – 10), the more relevant Google believes your ad is, thus the more exposure your ad will get. This is all in an effort to provide a great user experience that allows web surfers to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily.
With every search AdWords goes through thousands of ads in an instant and only includes those that seem most likely to provide exactly what the user is looking for.
So, do your ads provide a good user experience? You can tell by your Quality Score.
Checking Your Quality Score
Checking your Quality Score is not only easy, but something you should do quite often. Your scores will vary constantly, based on any changes you’ve made, as well as to factor in changes in the number of clicks your ads receive.
You can check your Quality Score by heading over to your Keywords tab, from within the Campaigns tab.
Once inside the Keywords tab, click the white speech bubbles next to any keyword status and your Quality Score will be revealed. Not only will you have access to the numbered score, but you’ll also get ratings for each of the factors that affect your score, including expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience.
You can also check your scores by looking for the Quality Score column inside the Keywords tab. Sometimes this particular column isn’t visible by default, but it’s easy to change. Simply click the Columns drop-down menu in the toolbar above the statistics table. Then select Customize columns, followed by Attributes. Lastly, click Add next to Qual. score, then Save.
How Your Quality Score is Calculated
It’s all fine and good to know what the QS is, but it’s even better if you can figure out how Google comes up with these numbers. That way, you can make changes if one of your keywords is severely underperforming.
There are a number of factors Google uses to calculate your score, including:
- The quality of your landing page – Is your landing page easy to navigate through? Is it relevant to the ad (if your ad includes a discount offer, does your landing page support that offer?)
- Clicks – How many clicks does your display URL receive?
- Expected CTR – Your keywords’ expected CTR (clickthrough rate) is based on past performances.
- Account history – How do all of your ads and keywords perform under your account? This will directly impact individual scores.
- Relevancy – Your keywords should be relevant to your ads, and your keywords should also be relevant to the search being conducted.
- Location – The more success your account has had in specific targeted regions, the higher your QS will be.
- Devices – Optimizing your ads for all possible devices improves your Quality Scores for each device (you get different scores for each type of device)
How Does Quality Score Affect You?
There are so many reasons you want to have a high Quality Score for your keywords. Here’s a rundown of the most important benefits:
- Lower CPCs! – Google will reward you for providing a good user experience. The higher the Quality Score, the lower your CPCs.
- Ad position – The higher your score, the higher your ad will likely appear, and the better chances your ad will be seen and clicked on (and again, the more clicks you get, the higher your score).
- Increased Ad Auction eligibility – The higher your score, the easier and cheaper it is for your keyword to enter the ad auction.
- Bid estimates – Higher scores lead to lower first page bid estimates, and lower top of page bid estimates. This means an improved positioning for your ads.
Great, now you know what Quality Score is, how to check it and how it affects you. But none of that does you any good if you can’t make the necessary changes required to improve all of your scores. Luckily OperationROI can help. We spend our lives inside the world of Google’s Quality Score algorithms and help businesses in all industries find ways to increase their scores and improve their ad performance. Contact us at 1-888-277-5429, or fill out or contact form , to learn how we can help you improve your Quality Scores.
