If you are trying to get the most out of PPC, especially Google Ads, you need to understand what your Google Quality Score is and how it affects your ads and how much you pay for them. Your Google Quality Score ranges from 1-10 and is a measure of the overall user experience users get when they see your ads and the landing pages they reach when they click on those ads. In Google’s terms, your quality score should be used to measure if your ads and landing pages are relevant to your potential visitors.
Factors That Affect Your Quality Score
Before we look at how you can improve your quality score, it is important to know which factors can affect it. These factors include:
- ● Landing page experience – How well does the information on the landing page correspond to what the ad promised a visitor? How relevant is the landing page to your ad’s content?
- ● Ad relevance – Is your ad appearing for the right keywords? Is your ad what users expect when they search for certain keywords?
- ● Expected click-through rate – Will users click on your ad when it is shown for the keywords they searched and how likely are they to do so?
Improving all three of the above factors is the best way to improve your quality score.
Improving Your Landing Page
According to various sources, Google prioritizes content originality and relevance, navigability and transparency when judging a landing page’s quality. When trying to improve your landing page, you should try to see if the copy aligns with the keywords you have chosen for your ads.
Your copy should be what people expect to see when they click on your ad. For example, if someone searches for “dress with polka dots” and your landing page contains plain white dresses, then your landing page is not providing the expected user experience.
Navigability refers to how organized your landing page is and how easy it is for people to find what they expect when they click on an ad. For example, if your landing page is full of pop-ups, modals, and takes too long to load, you are breaking this rule and might see a lower quality score for it.
Providing clear directions, clearly marking links and displaying a shopping basket all provide a good user experience, as does making it easy for people to contact your business.
Improving the Relevance of Your Ads
Ad relevance is a measure of how well a keyword matches the message contained in your ads. To ensure relevance, you should start by designating your ad groups into targeted campaigns. Instead of putting all your keywords in one group, you should group your keywords by theme. This involves dividing your keywords into different ad groups of similar keywords. These groups will be more relevant than having just a few ad groups.
When you have your keywords grouped into concentrated groups, it will be easier to write targeted copy for your landing pages and ads.
Reduce Your Ad Group’s Size
Although many experts say that 15-20 keywords per ad group is the best option, that is not always the case. A common problem with larger ad groups is that they may contain keywords that are not doing much for your quality score. Additionally, it is very difficult to craft an ad campaign that uses all the 15-20 keywords you are working with. Using fewer keywords per ad group, say 1-10, is therefore the best way to go about it.
Remember that your quality score relies a lot on the quality of your keywords and reducing the number of keywords in your ad groups means that you will be working with only the best, high-quality keywords that visitors are much more likely to click on.
Improving Your Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The expected CTR is a measure of how likely someone is to click on your ad. Estimating your CTR assumes that the keywords used in your ad will match the exact keywords searched for. Do note that your estimated CTR is not affected by factors such as the type of device or browser a user is using.
In your ad account, you will find keywords that have a rating of ‘below average’. These are keywords that are not performing as expected. Changing the copy of the ads with this listing to include the actual keyword will help you improve their CTR, thereby increasing your quality score.
Another way to improve the performance of your ads is to create more than one ad for each of your grouped keywords. This way, you can use a different keyword for each ad, thereby improving your expected click-through rate.
Additionally, you can remove keywords that people do not usually search for. You can also add new relevant keywords to your ad groups.
Writing High-Quality Ads and Copy
Having the right keywords does nothing for your quality score if you do not create ads that people will want to click on. Using the right keywords and creating high-quality copy around them not only improves your CTR, but also helps your landing pages rank better for the keywords you are targeting. This increase in CTR and improved landing page user experience will help you get more visitors in addition to improving your quality score.
Use Longer Ad Copy
The expanded text ads feature lets you run ads with longer text. Using more characters allows you to use long-tail keywords, which many people use when looking for information online. The use of long-tail keywords gives you more space to use search terms that are longer than what you would normally use.
Because many people use long-tail keywords, using expanded text makes it easier for them to find your ad and increases your ad’s relevance, which helps improve your quality score.
Improving your quality score affects how well your ad campaigns work, but it is not as hard as it sounds. Improving your score involves choosing the right keywords, grouping them according to the landing pages they relate to, writing high-quality ads that relate to these keywords and your landing pages, and then making sure your landing pages provide a good user experience and are helpful to your visitors.
