How To Improve Quality Score In Google Ads

Quality Score is a crucial component of successful PPC marketing. It’s not just about getting high marks to display on the family’s refrigerator door. Your Google Ads Q-Score impacts a number of areas of your campaigns and PPC strategies, including your costs, ad rank positions and more.

Quality Score is also a great indication of the performance status of your efforts. A high score reflects a successful and effective campaign, while the opposite can be a clear sign that something isn’t working as intended.

Given the significance of your Quality Score in Google Ads, it is important to understand what this score reflects and how you can improve the Quality Score of your own PPC strategies.

What Exactly Is Quality Score? What Influences Your Grade?

Your Quality Score is essentially a grade that Google assigns your PPC strategies. Google uses Quality Score to judge ads and ensure that they provide the best possible ad results to users based on their search keywords.

Again, your Quality Score is going to impact your costs, ad ranks, how often your ads appear and more. Every PPC marketer needs to work towards tirelessly improving Quality Score in Google Ads.

There are a number of factors, both known and unknown that influence this score. Google likes to keep the lid closed on every Quality Score consideration. These are the factors that are known to influence Q-Scores:

• Historical Performance: Google rewards Google Ads users that have consistently delivered good ad experiences. The Quality Score takes time and effort to build.
• Clickthrough Rates (CTR): One major way that Google measures your ad performance is by examining your historical clickthrough rates. High CTRs show Google that your ads are both relevant to the search query and compelling enough to draw clicks.
• Keyword Relevance: Google measures keyword relevance in a number of ways. How relevant is each keyword in your ad group? How relevant is the content of the ad to the targeted keyword? What about the content on the landing page?
• User Experience: How do users react and behave after clicking through your ads? Do they bounce back to the SERPs or stay for a while and explore multiple pages on your site? The latter is a sign of good user experience.
• Landing Page Quality: A substantial component to great user experience is the landing page that customers are brought to once they’ve clicked an ad. A quality landing page expands on the ad’s content, while still maintaining a cohesive experience. Everything on the landing page should make sense and contain the same offers promised in the ad itself.

You can summarize these Quality Score factors with two words: relevance and quality. If you strive to have both traits in every ad message that you create, then you’re well on your way to an impressive Quality Score.

3 Steps For How To Improve Quality Score In Google Ads

Now that you have a clear picture of the factors that influence Quality Score, you can begin using that knowledge to improve your own scores.

Step 1: Start With Your Keywords in  Ad Groups

Keywords in ad groups are one of the biggest culprits when it comes to reasons why your Quality Scores aren’t as high as you’d like them to be. PPC marketers often make the mistake of having broad ad groups because it saves time in creating ad content.

Why create six unique ads for six different keywords when you can organize those keywords into the same ad group and use the same ad message for each? Well, low-Quality scores are one reason.

The problem with most ad groups is that not all of the keywords are actually relevant to one another. The result is that not all of the keywords in the group actually work well with the ad message, which produces lackluster results and harms your Quality Score.

Some marketers invest in single keyword ad groups, also known as SKAGs. While this means creating a lot more ads, it guarantees that your ad groups are relevant and every ad message is effective. The smaller your ad groups, the better your success.

Step 2: Identify The Biggest Detractors First

Often, repairing the most substantial cracks in your PPC strategies will provide the biggest and fastest rewards to your Quality Scores. Which campaigns, ad groups or keywords are your least successful? These are likely causing the most significant damage to your Q-Scores.

Once you’ve identified the weakest links on your PPC account, you have two options: repair or pause them. In an ideal world, you could fix all of these poor performing parts. Unfortunately, there likely isn’t enough time and allowing them to continue to underperform will only hurt your Quality Scores further.

Thus, you have to make smart and even difficult decisions about which PPC efforts are worth repairing and which need to be placed on the backburner. You may discover some of your campaigns or ad groups are not working because they just aren’t relevant to your company and its products.

Step 3: Listen To Your Data!

Data is your friend when it comes to improving Quality Score. Luckily, PPC strategies create a ton of it. This information can be used to identify where your Quality Score is being lost and gained.

You want to examine every part of the ad process, whether the targeted keyword, the ad message itself or the resulting landing page and find out what’s working and what isn’t. You don’t want to rely solely on correcting mistakes; you also want to identify what strategies are producing successful PPC results.

The more time you spend analyzing your PPC data, the more opportunities and insights will appear to help you raise your Quality Scores.

Conclusions

Ultimately, the key for how to improve Quality Scores in Google Ads is effort. The more time and effort you put into your PPC ad experiences, the better your overall Quality Scores will be. This means paying close attention to your data and finding insights into what works and what doesn’t and then applying those lessons to improve your grade.