Google Adwords is one of the best tools marketers have in their arsenal to promote a business and manage ads. Most of us use it every day, yet even though it’s so linked with our lives, there are still a lot of elements to be discovered about it.
We are talking here about the Adwords Quality Score, which may leave a lot of people scratching their heads. Most of us know what it means (it’s like a grade our ads receive, ) and that it can decide how our ads will perform, but do you know the full story?
Here’s our take on it.
What Is Adwords Quality Score and Why You Should Care
To give it a very simplistic view, the quality score is a way to see if your ad is any good. It’s not perfect, but more of an estimate of how relevant your ad is to the user who sees it.
The higher the quality score, the better the ad, which also means more people may interact positively with it, and you can expect a lower cost per click.
The thing is, we don’t exactly know what Google takes into consideration to establish the quality score. However, based on what we know about the company and its goals (to provide users with the best experience they can,) we have three main things we should look at:
- The landing page experience
- The relevance of the ads
- Expected CTR (click through rate) of the keywords
If these are okay, then you can expect higher quality scores and higher CTR. But Google doesn’t just give this mark out for no reason – it needs it for something. And that something is the Ad Rank, also known as the ad position in the paid section of the search results.
This fact completely obliterates the misconception that in Google Ads the more you’re willing to pay for a click, the better the Ad Rank you’re assigned. While it’s true that bidding more on a keyword can take you ahead of the competition, money is not the only criteria Google looks at to decide the rank
So if the average cost of a keyword is $1, and you go in and bid $5 on it, you’re effectively ahead of everyone else. But, Google will then look at your Quality Score, and if it’s low, then your rank goes down, and your competitors go up.
Because even if you tell Google “hey, I’m going to pay 5 times more for every click than anyone else,” Google will reply with “yeah, but your ad isn’t relevant to our users.” Now, do you see the importance of having a good Quality Score?
Where to Find Your Quality Score
Go to your AdWords account and look for the Keywords tab to select the Quality Score. You’ll then have four options:
- Score
- Landing Page Expert.
- Ad Relevance
- CTR
So, you can either view the overall Quality Score (which is the first option) or choose to see specific areas. Either way, select one, click apply, and that’s it!
The score gives a mark from 1 to 10, 10 being the best and 1 being, well, not the best. If your quality score is generally above 7, you’re doing a pretty good job. It’s also possible to see a ‘-’ where the score should be. This is called a “null quality score,” and it mostly appears for new keywords that haven’t gathered enough data yet. As your ad and campaigns continue to run, the score will appear as well.
How to Improve Your Quality Score
Improving your quality score requires looking back at your ad elements and seeing what needs to be tweaked, from the ad copy to the relevancy between the keywords and ad or ads and landing pages.
You need to see the full lifespan of the ad to understand the entire process. First, you create ads. Then you bid on certain keywords, which will trigger every time a user does a google search for them. After that, once people start to view the ad, they click on the link and are redirected to the landing page, where they hopefully convert.
Any bumps in this process can mean you lose a user. Here are some good tips on how to get rid of these bumps and improve the quality score:
- Look at the Specific Field Numbers
If you review your Google Quality Score on specific issues of the ads, you get a better idea of what you need to change. For instance, if you have a lower quality score for a landing page experience, but the other fields are fine, then you need to improve the landing page.
- Check for Negative Keywords
Negative keywords tell Google when you don’t want an ad to activate. For instance, you may want to reach users who type “fishing equipment online” in the search engine, but want to exclude those who also type “Sydney,” because you don’t want or need your ads to show in these cases.
- Review Your Keywords
Keywords should be chosen carefully, and the Keyword Planner is a great tool that can help in that department. Often, if you’re bidding on the wrong keyword from the start, meaning it’s not something people search for, every else just falls apart as well.
Signing off
Your Quality Score is really a metric you should check from time to time if you’re running Google Ads campaigns because it’s the best way to tell that something’s wrong, and what you need to do.
So keep that in mind the next time you look at your ad results and aren’t too pleased with them. And if you need some additional help, contact Australian Internet Advertising right now!
