5 Ways to Improve your Quality Score

What is Quality Score, How is it Determined and What are the Ways to Improve it?

You have a phenomenal product with the most competitive price, but have you thought about its relevance to the buyers you’re selling to?

What is the deciding factor to determine this? Google has the answer!

The caliber of each of your advertisements is measured by Google with the use of what’s called ‘Quality Score’.

Quality score may not be the key performance indicator but it is a very critical diagnostic tool which all advertisers need to be familiar with to see better results out of their ad spending.

What is Quality Score?

A great ad is good for business because more people are likely to click on it and thus businesses can drive more conversions. If the ad is good for business, then it’s good for Google too! Google strives to maintain a strong presence on its advertising platform so as to ensure both parties are happy. It wants to make sure that everybody wins and that’s why this grading system is incorporated.

Quality Score is a dynamic variable assigned to keywords that are most likely to influence your ad rank and the cost per click. So in order to achieve a better Quality Score, you would essentially need to achieve a higher ranking at a lower cost.

So how is a Quality Score determined?

The calculation of Quality score is controlled by various factors. Some authoritative factors affecting the quality score could be the type of search queries, devices used, demographics or even the time of the day. During the bidding process, these metrics are not directly correlated to the score you see in your account.

Primarily, Google bases your Adwords Quality Score on various components like:

1. Your Click Through Rate (CTR)
2. Landing Page Quality and Relevance
3. The relevance of each keyword to its ad group.
4. The relevance of your ad text
5. Your historical Google Ads account performance.

The above components are classified and graded as below average, above average or average and their values keep varying based on user searches. As and when users perform a search, google keeps recalculating the above components and helps to come up with an Ad Rank.

How to improve Quality Score?

1. Research Keywords

Everything that you do is based with keywords. You can consider them to be the pillars of all building PPC activities that you do. A poor keyword research will distress your Google Ads account.

Many PPC marketers rely on easily available and free public keyword tools to compile keywords. This is an absolutely unreliable way to work. These tools generally blurt out some supposedly popular keywords which in no way could truly be relevant to your brand or customers.

As a best practice it is healthy to dig through your own web analytics and logs which are much richer sources of keywords. Your own data shows you the exact phrases and terms used by real people while searching for your products and services. This approach gives you a lot more accurate picture of which keywords have led to conversions and helps you focus more on those areas first.

2. Structure your campaigns into smaller yet targeted ad groups.

Cultivate a strong list of closely relevant keywords. Don’t forget to include long-tail suggestions too and then classify those words into close-knit targeted groups. Structuring campaigns into specific ad groups increases the relevancy among the search query and the ads shown. Hence it is useful to set campaigns with many targeted ad groups instead of just one or two which hardly helps to conserve the degree of relevance. Additionally it is better to limit the number of keywords on each ad group and make it less crowded.

3. Write outstanding ad copies

Craft an ad copy that is tailored around the chosen keywords that you’ve researched. This will boost the relevance of your keywords on every ad that you display. An optimum quality ad will specifically talk about a single product or service which can really pull in the kind of crowd that you want. Scattered ads which talk about more than one product or service tends to disinterest the reader. Give your customers what they need – to the point. Ads which are crisp and tidy generally tend to have more impact. Like any other marketing strategy, a bit of A/B testing will deliver powerful insights that will help you make your overall campaign much stronger. Begin with testing out few copy options for every ad group and figure out which ones bring in a high CTR. Higher the click through rate, better the relevancy and quality score.

4. Work on your Landing Page

Just bringing people to your website or any other indefinite piece of content isn’t going to fetch you a good quality score and neither conversions. Design high-quality targeted landing pages for every campaign or individual ad group that’s running. When users click your ads after performing a search in Google, the page they are led to should meet their expectations and not simply confuse or drive them off. Offer a very aesthetically pleasing and cohesive end-to-end user experience that is sure to intrigue your potential lead and urge them to make a purchase. After all happy visitors often turn into buyers.

5. Evolve with trends

Finally it is important to constantly evolve towards betterment as the trends keep changing. It’s not possible for you to reach a certain level and seek a permanent place for the high-quality score forever. The way user searches (and behaviour) are always fluctuating, your ad relevance and quality score should also keep evolving. If you’re goal is to achieve a high quality score and stick to it forever then you need to commit yourself to regularly work on improving campaigns. Which means refreshing new keywords and ad groups, updating the ad copies and creatives, analysing your results to keep upgrading your approach as your campaigns mature.

Conclusion

If you’re currently running the paid campaigns inhouse or have another agency managing it for you, and are wondering whether you are getting the best result out of your advertising spend, it’s time to register for our FREE PPC Audit now!