Google uses its own score system to assess whether ads are of a certain quality, and beneficial to other people.
Here, Google wants both users, advertisers and Google search results to meet certain requirements in order to achieve a good experience. In short, this means that high-quality ads may also experience higher rankings in Google search results.
Read on to learn more about Google’s Quality Score, what it is and how this scale can impact your ad performance!
Three Things You Have to Think About
Your Google ads are rated according to a score of 1-10, based on how many quality requirements Google thinks your ad meets.
Here, among other things, Google look at three key components when a user searches for something online:
- Expected CTR: How likely is it for someone to click on your ad?
- Ad relevance: How relevant is the content to what the user is searching for?
- Landing page experience: How clear and relevant is your site? How easy is it to navigate on the site?
Based on this, Google will rank your ads as above average, average, or below average.
The User’s Device Has an Impact on Ad Quality
Devices like tablets, smartphones or laptops are taken into account when Google calculates ad quality.
This means that you have to make sure, for example, that the landing page and website are optimized for all devices.Therefore, it may be smart to target your ads to mobile users, using mobile-friendly ads and pages – but this is not a requirement from Google.
However, Google can look at how easy it is to find the information and navigate on your website for mobile users.
Relevance
Google considers relevance as the core of ad quality and organic search results, and look at the user’s search and intentions.
Therefore, you should make it as easy as possible to:
- Find relevant information
- Conduct a sale or other task
- Navigate
This will most likely increase your ad quality and cause your ads to rank higher and get a better score. Because Google views relevance as part of their score, you should also focus on this rather than ad manipulation to improve your Quality Score.
Additionally, make sure your ads are relevant to other related keywords to improve your performance. This is especially true for areas where your ads have the potential to achieve a higher Quality Score.
Relevance vs Keyword Stuffing
Note that relevance is not the same as keyword stuffing – you should not overfill text and titles with the keyword or search phrase for Google to find the content relevant. Rather focus on synonyms and, generally, on quality.
Authority
If your Google Ads account has a good reputation and your website has a high level of authority, this could have a positive impact on your ads.
But if you have a new account or website, you probably haven’t achieved a high enough authority yet. Fortunately, Google sees that there is enough data to provide estimates and that keywords, ads, and landing pages are of good quality, you can still get a good score.
The same goes for organic search results – if your website has good authority, organic search results may rank higher in Google. But you can also influence the results here as well.
The structure of your Google Ads account
How you choose to structure your account will not affect your Quality Score. You can name campaigns or determine the number of ad groups as needed, without compromising your score.
Also, adding new keywords to new ad groups or campaigns will not affect quality.
However, you will be able to negatively impact the Quality Score in any changes that may affect the user experience. These may be changes to your ad text or landing page.
Ad Placement
Although an ad has a high placement in the Google results, this will not affect the expected clickthrough rate. This is because Google normalizes the expected clickthrough rate by the position the ad actually has on the page.
For example, it is expected that a first place placement will get more clicks than a third or fourth place.
Also, where you run your ad campaign will not affect your ad quality – but it can create more volume, so you should always target more users where it is appropriate. For instance, if you are advertising a credit card or consumer loans, these ads would be appropriate to place on a finance blog or in searches relevant to this topic.
Conclusion
Quality Score acts as a useful diagnostic tool but not as a key indicator. Therefore, you should not manage your ads accordingly, but rather use the score as a guide to which ads are considered quality ads.
You can, among other things, diagnose keyword quality by using Quality Score, keeping focus on high-value areas, or seeing that the changes you have made have had a positive effect. Also, make sure that the ads considered the most competitive are visible in each auction.
And finally, always make sure you think about the three most important components of ad quality:
- Expected CTR
- Ad relevance
- Landing page experience
Good luck!