Understanding Quality Score: The Key to Lowering Costs

In PPC marketing, there are a number of factors that contribute to the effectiveness of your ads and where they are placed on the search results page. When it comes to Google Ads, quality score is a tool that is designed to give you and your business a sense of how well your ad quality compares to those of your competitors.

How it is calculated

Quality score is based on the combined performance of expected click-through rate (CTR), overall ad relevance, and the landing page experience of the website that the ad links to. Each of these factors will be evaluated and given a status ranging from ‘below average’, ‘average’, and ‘above average’ (support.google.com). These rankings are determined by comparing them to other advertisers that are targeting the exact same keywords over the last 90 days.

To put it simply, the expected CTR predicts how likely your ads are to be clicked when they are served on Google’s results page and it is calculated based on previous performance. The ad relevance is self explanatory – it measures how much an ad matches the intent behind a user’s search. The relevance of the ad copy is assessed against the keywords that are being targeted; Generally, the ads that are more relevant to user searches often have higher quality scores. Lastly, the landing page experience is the quality, relevance, and overall user experience of the page that users are taken to after clicking on an ad.

Whilst quality score remains the exclusive algorithm that Google uses, it is important to remember that the evaluated factors are beneficial to other search engines as well.

How to improve quality score

Unfortunately, it is difficult to improve the expected CTR as it is mostly out of your control – although Google does state that engaging ad copy and the use of assets can help to improve it. However, both the ad relevance and landing page experience can be improved – the ad relevance being easier to control and manage in comparison to the improvement of a landing page.

Ad relevance can be built on by creating specific ad groups for particular products and services. For example, if you are a business that sells a variety of cars it is recommended that separate ad groups are created for each car brand – like Ford, BMW, Audi etc. If someone is searching for a particular car brand, they will be more likely to click the ad that promotes that instead of the general car dealership ad. It is important to create separate ad groups for your products and services, as it also allows you to gain higher quality traffic and leads at a much lower cost thanks to you serving more specific ads.

As previously mentioned, improving the user experience of your landing page contributes to improving your quality score. For those unfamiliar, the landing page is the page on a website that you are directed to after clicking on an ad – for example, if a user clicks on an ad for a Nike Air shoe, they should be directed to the Nike Air shoe page on the website after clicking.

In regard to actually improving the landing pages, factors like the website load times, mobile-compatibility, and how easy it is to navigate all play their parts in contributing to how successful the landing page is.

If you are aiming to increase the page speed of your landing page it helps to optimise the images on the page in question, as well as other backend methods like minimising HTTP requests through reducing the amount of elements on the page like scripts and images to name a few.

Making a landing page mobile-friendly is essential for user experience, with 53.3% of web traffic now being mobile-directed (embryo.com). In order to do this it is important to make sure that the copy of the landing page is clear and concise, and that there are effective sticky CTAs – these differ from regular CTAs because they are stuck to the mobile screen so that they are not lost whilst a user is scrolling through the site.

Understanding and optimising quality score is a large contributor to the success of Google Ads campaigns. Not only does it influence the placement of ads in search engine results, but it also impacts the overall costs of the PPC, further stressing the importance of this tool. By utilising the earlier mentioned methods of how to improve quality score, you will not only see lower costs but more effective and successful campaigns.

At Website Design Ltd, we have vast experience in various industries, bringing them success through our account management and the optimisation of quality score mentioned in this blog – Reach out to us today to see how we can help your marketing.