Is Your Adwords Quality Score Losing You Customers?

Lets Take A Look At How Google’s Quality Score Affects Your Online PPC Adverting

For businesses ready to drive serious revenue, Google AdWords is an essential part of your digital strategy. An average advertiser can double their return with AdWords. Targeting the right keywords and creating amazing ads are simply the first steps to generating serious ROI online. But there is more to it, like, for example, Google Adwords quality score.

You need to address a variety of important factors.

Some of the most crucial ones include:

• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Landing page quality
• Ad relevance

However, there’s one metric that encompasses all the important factors – Quality Score. But what is quality score?

Your ad’s Quality Score has a direct impact on your paid ad’s ROI. The higher your score, the lower your cost per conversion. A conversion is any action that you want the customer to take, such as making a purchase or signing up to a webinar.

Figure 1 – https://www.wordstream.com/quality-score

A better Quality Score means more people see your ads for a lower cost per click. Less money, more conversions. That’s the dream!

If you’re burning through the big bucks without getting the traction, now’s the time to review your Pay-Per-Click / PPC advertising marketing strategy.

There are several things that you can do to improve your Quality Score.

To understand what will make the biggest impact, let’s first dive into what Quality Score is.

A Complete Guide To Quality Scores

Quality Score is Google’s rating of the quality and relevancy of your keywords, ads and landing pages. Thousands of advertisers are vying for top rankings in Google for the same keywords. So how does Google decide which ads rank where, in what position and at what cost? That’s where Quality Score comes into play.

Quality Score is essentially the Google Ads rating system for ads. It scores your ad from 1 to 10 based on relevancy and quality.

Why does Google use Quality Score, how do they work it out, why should you care, and how can you improve the Quality Score of your ads?

Let’s dive in.

What is Quality Score?

Quality Score is essentially the Google Ads rating system for ads. It’s a number ranging from 1 to 10 that ranks your PPC ad based on:

• Landing page experience
• Relevance of ad text to keywords
• Quality of the ad
• Historical performance, including click-through rate (CTR)

1 represents low relevance and quality; 10 represents the highest relevance and quality.

Relevancy is really the most important factor here. The more relevant your keywords and ad copy are to the product or service you’re promoting, the higher your Quality Score.

You can influence all of these factors, which will increase your score and the performance of your campaigns.

Google uses the Quality Score alongside your maximum CPC bid (the most you are willing to spend per click for each keyword) to determine how often an ad shows, its position on the page, and how much the ad costs.

REPEAT: While you have an insane level of control over audience targeting, it’s the Google Ads auction and algorithm that have the final word on where your ads will be positioned and what you’ll spend compared to competitors.

How Quality Score is calculated

Just as Google uses algorithms to work out where organic search results will be placed, it also uses algorithms to monitor how users interact with search engine results page (SERP) to predict future interactions.

And let’s face it – Google has no shortage of data on how users are interacting with search results.

Essentially, Quality Score is an evolution from the days when Google would use click-through rate (CTR) to determine if keywords were low relevance, or if advertisers should pay more to get a good position.

Now, it uses machine learning to consider more factors when determining the predicted CTR.

Why does Google have Quality Score?

Google’s mission is to make internet information accessible and useful to everyone.

While Google Ads are paid, this doesn’t stop Google from wanting to show more relevant ads to users every time they search.

Another way to look at it is that Google needs the advertising revenue, so they have a vested interest in making sure users find the ads relevant and click on them.

The better the advertisers do, the more likely they will spend big bucks on Google Ads.

Why Quality Score matters

One word: ROI.

Google actually rewards advertisers with high Quality Scores by giving them lower costs and higher ad rank.

So, advertisers with high-quality scores can bid lower than their competitors with low-quality scores and still have their ads rank higher in the SERPs.

Research by WordStream revealed that advertisers with Quality Scores in the 8, 9, and 10 range can see on average 37%-50% DISCOUNT on CPCs.

On the flipside, those with scores in the 4, 5, and 6 range seen an INCREASE of 16%-25% on CPCs.

Focusing on your score is essential if you want to drive serious revenue through Google Ads.

Your ad’s Quality Score has a DIRECT IMPACT on your return on investment.

The higher your Quality Score, the higher number of people will see your ads for a lower cost per click.

Image credit: AdEspresso

Less money, more conversions, lower cost per conversion.

Now, that’s how you see your ROI soar.

Here’s one more benefit of a high Quality Score that you might not realise. A higher score gives you access to more extensions.

Using ad extensions is a great way of increasing your CTR.

If you have a high Quality Score, Google lets you set up more of them.

How to check your Quality Score

1. Go to your Google Ads account (formerly Google Adwords account).
2. Select the campaign you want to check.
3. Click on ‘Keywords’.
4. Click on ‘Columns’.
5. Select ‘Modify columns’.
6. Click on the ‘Qual. Score’ box.
7. Select which measurements you want to see.
8. Click ‘Save’.

You should see something like this:

Image Credit: Google

How to boost your Quality Score

Improving your Quality Score is a simple case of improving the relevancy of your ads, keywords and landing pages.

Use this actionable checklist.

A. Keep keyword groups small and hyper-relevant.

Your aim is to ONLY deliver the ad that’s relevant to the keyword used. So, every ad group needs to have a tight theme, and every keyword needs to be relevant to the ad group.

If you see one keyword that deviates from the theme, create a specific group for it.

B. Optimise landing pages to deliver an exceptional user experience

User experience is one of Google’s top priorities, which means it should be yours too. If your landing pages don’t offer a good experience, Google gives it a lower Quality Score.

Always ensure the landing page is relevant to the search terms AND is easy to navigate.

Make it easy to use on mobile and desktop, and make sure load time stays low.

C. Customise landing pages for specific ad groups

Tailor your landing pages to specific ad groups – this ensures every landing page is highly relevant to the keywords and ads.

Recap

Along with your maximum CPC bid, Quality Score is a major factor in how Google decides which ads to show, where to show them and at what cost.

The fact is a good Quality Score can give you the winning edge over your competitors. This puts advertisers of all sizes on a more level playing field. Because it’s not the size of your budget that matters most, but the relevance of your ads.

Now Lets Review What Google Adwords Quality Score Is All About

A Quality Score is Google Ads’ rating system that measures the relevance and quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. It’s scored on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 indicates low relevance and quality, and 10 signifies excellent relevance and quality.

This score impacts your ad’s ad rank and the cost-per-click (CPC). A higher Adwords Quality Score can lead to better ad placements and lower costs. Google uses it to ensure users see the most relevant and useful ads for their searches.

Aside from CPC, this is what decides how effective your campaign is.

A good Quality Score means that you’ve managed to maximise the three main components mentioned above.

To determine your score, Google also uses other factors, including:

• On-page content
• On-page architecture
• Historic keyword CTRs
• Historic ad CTRs

Here’s something that you’ll like to hear:

You can actively improve these factors, which will enhance your Adwords Quality Score and boost the performance of your campaigns. By focusing on relevancy, ad quality, and landing page experience, you’ll optimise your ads for better visibility and cost efficiency.

An improved score can increase your profits by a lot.

Here are some reasons why:

1. High Quality Score decreases your CPC

By satisfying Google’s criteria, you’re better at converting new customers and your ads will deliver more effectively. This means lower cost per click and a lower cost of customer acquisition.

A lower CPC ultimately affects your ROI because you spend less on acquiring the customer. When spread across an entire ad campaign, low CPC leads to higher profits.

2. You get better ad positions

Google knows how to recognise high-quality landing pages. The higher its quality, the better spot you can expect.

3. You can access a greater number of extensions

Using ad extensions is an effective way to boost your click-through rate (CTR). When you maintain a high Quality Score, Google allows you to add more ad extensions, giving you additional opportunities to make your ads more engaging and informative.

Now that you understand the influence that the Quality Score has on your campaign performance, you probably want to know how to increase it.

Luckily, there are many things that you can do to make this happen, so let’s go over some of the best ones.

How Do You Check Your Quality Score

You’ve seen the factors that Google takes into account when determining your score.

Now it’s time to dig a bit deeper.

Before you can improve your score, you need to identify the aspects of your campaigns that need the most tweaking.

To do this, you need an overview of your current score so that you can find your starting point.

Here’s how to check your score:

1. Sign into your AdWords account.
2. Select the campaign that you want to check.
3. Click on the ‘Keywords’ tab.
4. Click on ‘Columns’.
5. Select ‘Modify columns’.
6. Click on the ‘Qual. Score’ box.
7. Select the measurements that you want to see.
8. Click ‘Save’.

Now that you know the position that you’re in, here are some things that you can do to improve it.

How to improve Adwords Quality Score: 5 tips for right now

1. Keep keyword groups small and super relevant

Well-organised keyword groups can make a huge difference.

Here’s a thing to remember:

Each ad group should have a clear and focused theme, with keywords closely aligned to that theme. If you notice a keyword that doesn’t quite fit, create a separate ad group for it.

By organising your keywords into well-structured groups, you improve the relevance between your keywords and the ads shown, which in turn enhances your Quality Score.

Let’s take the Ice Cream Campaign from this image.

You’ll have the overall campaign. Within that campaign you’ll have multiple ads. For example “Chocolate Ice Cream” and “Vanilla Ice Cream”.

For each of those ads, you need to use relevant keywords. So, the “Chocolate Ice Cream” ad could have keywords like:

• Chocolate Ice Cream
• Chocolate Flavoured Ice Cream

And so on.

What you don’t want is to create a huge list of keywords that you try to apply to all the ads. This could lead to your chocolate ad displaying for a keyword like “Vanilla Ice Cream”. This lowers relevance and affects Adwords Quality Score.

Your aim is to only deliver the ad that’s relevant to the keyword used. The more specific the keyword, the more specific the ad must be to attain a high Quality Score.

2. Master long-tail keyword research

This is something that you’ve probably heard a lot of times.

You’ll hear it a lot more.

This is because search engines are constantly evolving, so there’s always something new to learn.

Probably the most important thing to know though has to do with long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords have 3+words and are very specific to what you’re offering. They’re what allow you to catch the searchers who use more than just the most popular phrase when searching.

Even though they might be less popular in terms of search volume, they can bring a load of traffic.

Take a look at this example:

Source: https://ahrefs.com/blog/long-tail-keywords-research/

The highlighted website ranks #3 for the keyword ‘website traffic’, which gets roughly around 10,000 monthly searches.

According to research, the 3^rd result should get slightly more than 11% of that traffic.

However, this page gets close to 7000, much higher than expected.

There are almost 600 keywords that make this happen, so let’s take a look at them:

Source: https://ahrefs.com/blog/long-tail-keywords-research/

As you can see, these are all long-tail keywords which bring almost 7000 pure, organic visits.

Imagine what would happen if you added them to your PPC campaign. Their potential might catch you by surprise.

A great way of finding these great keywords for your campaign is by using the Keyword Tool API. It’s based on Google Suggest, which is definitely a feature that you should take advantage of. It helps you find the best long-tail keywords that you can incorporate into your campaign.

3. Optimise landing pages to create a brilliant experience

User experience is a top priority for Google, and it should be for you too. Google’s goal is to provide the best experience for searchers, as they are ultimately their customers. If your landing page offers a poor experience, Google will assign it a lower Quality Score, affecting your ad performance.

You can create the best ad campaign, but if you don’t optimise your landing page, you won’t get a good Adwords Quality Score. An optimised landing page sends positive signals to Google, which leads to a higher Quality Score. Plus, it guides the visitors who land on that page to the actions that you want them to take.

Unless you can provide great user experience, your CTR will not be anywhere as high as it can be.

There are two rules to remember:

• The landing page needs to be relevant to the keywords.
• The landing page needs to be easy to navigate.

Let’s break these rules down.

When it comes to relevancy, the main thing that you need to do is include the search term in all the right places on the page.

The keyword needs to appear in the headline, intro, and at least once more on the landing page.

These are really the basics of what Search Engine Optimisation / SEO is, but many people overlook them because they’re paying for ads. They think that SEO is less important if you’re not going for organic visits.

This is not true.

It would be a mistake to fail to follow the rules of SEO, not only will you rank lower, but you might also mislead your visitors.

For the second rule, you need to make sure that your visitors will enjoy looking at your content.

This means a couple of things.

First of all, you need to ensure that the loading speed is fast. This can both affect the search ranking and make a world of difference to user experience.

It goes without saying that the page needs to be mobile-friendly. 96% of mobile searches happen on Google, and we all know that the world is going mobile. This is why it’s necessary to optimise your pages for mobile devices.

Of course, the content of the page needs to stand out and be engaging. Even though this won’t affect the CTR by a lot, provided that the keywords are there, it will affect something much more important.

That something is your conversion rate.

If you fail to provide value to your users, you might lose them, which can make all your efforts in vain.

To avoid this, make sure that the content on your landing pages is inviting and can motivate the users to engage with you further.

4. Tailor Landing Pages to Match Ad Group Themes

Customising your landing pages to align with specific ad groups is an effective strategy for boosting your Adwords Quality Score.

We’ve already established that relevance is one of the key things that ensure a high score. Customising your landing pages to fit appropriate ad groups ensures relevance.

In customising a landing page, you need to focus on message matching. This means that you need to ensure the landing page delivers exactly what the related ad says it will.

Here’s an example from the Hootsuite blog. Imagine you’ve conducted a search for the keyword “blue track jacket”. You see the following ad:

Figure 3 – https://blog.hootsuite.com/adwords-quality-score/

Note the message matching in the headline and the body of the ad. So far, so good.

The searcher clicks on that ad and expects to see a landing page like this:

Figure 4- https://blog.hootsuite.com/adwords-quality-score/

This is a highly relevant landing page that matches the message from the ad. As a result, it gets a higher Adwords quality score.

Now, imagine that page just showed a few generic jackets of all different colours. That’s not relevant to the user’s search. Plus, it doesn’t match the message you delivered with the ad.

That makes the landing page less relevant, which brings your Quality Score down.

Does this mean that you have to create an entirely new page?

Fortunately it doesn’t.

You can use an existing page on your website, as long as the content matches the keywords. If you manage to do it, you have a much better chance of generating traffic.

5. Customise ad copy for specific ad groups

You can, and should, run multiple ads within a specific group.

The reason for this is that you can create a small competition to see which one performs better.

When you create ad copy, you get to set up the rotation schedule. This allows your ads to automatically switch over, so you can get insight into how they’re performing.

This is what makes A/B testing possible. It lets you compare the ad copy and identify the one that works the best.

You can do this easily by using the A/B Testing Significance Calculator. Simply put in the number of visitors and conversions for both ads, and you’ll see the impact that the changes have had.

This allows you to tweak and refine your ads until you find the perfect one.

How to Achieve a 10/10 Google Adwords Quality Score

Achieving a perfect 10/10 Adwords Quality Score in Google Ads requires a strategic approach to optimise the relevance and quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages.

Here are some key steps to help you reach that goal:

Make Sure Your Ads Are Highly Relevant

• Match keywords with ad copy: Ensure your ad copy closely matches the keywords you’re bidding on. The more relevant the ad, the better your chances of a high Quality Score.
• Use dynamic keyword insertion (DKI): This technique, similar to dynamic search ads in general, automatically updates your ad copy with the exact keyword a user searched, enhancing relevance.

Improve Your Landing Page Experience

• Optimise for relevance: Your landing page should directly relate to the ad. If someone clicks on an ad for “leather jackets,” they should land on a page specifically showcasing leather jackets, not a general clothing page.
• Enhance user experience: Ensure your landing page loads quickly, is mobile-friendly, and offers easy navigation. The better the experience, the higher your Quality Score.
• Provide valuable content: Include clear, concise information and a strong call-to-action (CTA). Make sure the page meets users’ expectations from the ad.

Increase Click-Through Rate (CTR)

• Write compelling ad copy: Focus on creating ads with strong headlines, a clear value proposition, and a strong CTA that encourage clicks.
• Use ad extensions: Add extensions like sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets to provide more information and increase your ad’s visibility.
• A/B test your ads: Regularly test different ad variations to identify which one performs best in terms of CTR.

Organise Your Campaign Structure

• Group similar keywords: Keep your keywords tightly related within ad groups. This improves ad relevance and makes it easier to create targeted ads.
• Avoid irrelevant keywords: Make sure every keyword you bid on is directly related to the ad group’s theme. Remove any that don’t fit.

Use Negative Keywords

• Prevent wasted spend: Use negative keywords to filter out irrelevant traffic. This improves ad relevance and helps increase CTR, ultimately improving your Quality Score.

Monitor and Optimise Regularly

• Track performance: Keep an eye on key metrics like CTR, conversion rate, and bounce rate to gauge how your ads and landing pages are performing.
• Adjust campaigns: Based on the data, make adjustments to your keywords, ad copy, and landing pages to improve results.

A higher Quality Score means your ads will likely appear in better positions at a lower cost-per-click (CPC), helping you achieve a more cost-effective advertising campaign. That is why you really need to focus on creation high quality online google ad campaigns.

The Takeaway

With these best practices for Google ads / Adwords quality score at your fingertips, you’re onto bigger and better results in no time. Adwords is one of those platforms with brilliant potential that’s not always unlocked.

Keep in mind that this is not something that you can master overnight. It might take some experimenting, and you might not see immediate changes.

Go ahead and find those things that are causing trouble to your campaigns.

Once you identify them and do some tweaking, you can expect your online strategy to yield much better results.

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About the Author

Andrew Raso

Andrew Raso, Co-founder and Global CEO of Online Marketing Gurus, has been instrumental in transforming the agency from a start-up into a $15 million global powerhouse. Since co-founding OMG in 2012 with colleague Mehrdad Hedayati, Andrew has leveraged his deep expertise in SEO and digital marketing to drive OMG’s expansion across Australia, the US, and Singapore.