What is Quality Score?
Quality Score is a metric that Google uses to determine where advertisers rank how relevant everything is. AdWords functions as an auction, and if the system purely ran on bids, then companies with irrelevant ads could always bid their way to the top. This is why the quality score is a major indicator of the relevance and health of the account.
More relevant ads get higher click-through rates (CTR), so CTR is one of the major components of quality score. Other factors that influence your quality score include:
- The relevance of your keywords to its ad group
- Landing page quality
- The relevance of your ad text
- Your historical account performance
Every time one of your ads qualifies to be displayed on a search engine, based on what keywords you’re bidding on and what match types you’re using, Google calculates a score between 1 and 10 for your ad. The higher this score, the better your ad rank will be and can qualify you to appear in a higher position that your competitors who are bidding more than you.
But the quality score doesn’t just affect ad position – it also has an enormous effect on how much you pay when someone clicks your ad.
How Quality Score Affects Cost Per Click
Your CPC is determined by the following formulae: the ad rank of the advertiser below you, divided by your quality score, plus 1%.
For example, advertiser one could be paying £2 for his maximum cost per click and have a 10/10 quality score and his ads will show higher than his competitors with a low-quality score and higher bids.
How To Increase Your Quality Score
Quality Score determines where and how often your ads appear, it is important to boost your ratings by working consistently on your account. This can be achieved by focusing efforts on several key areas:
Keyword Research – discover, new highly relevant keywords to add to your campaigns including long-tail opportunities that can contribute to your overall traffic.
Keyword Organisation– split your keywords into tight, organised groups that can be more effectively tied to individual ad campaigns.
Refining ad text– test out PPC ad copy that is more targeted to your individual ad groups. More effective ads get higher CTR which is one of the best ways to improve quality score.
Optimising landing pages– create landing pages that are highly relevant and related to your ad text will have higher chances of better performance.
Adding negative keywords– Constant research into the negative keywords is needed to ensure no wasted budget. Continuously research and identify these negative keywords to improve the performance of the account.
