Adwords’ quality score is one of the most essential factors in running a successful paid search marketing campaign. It’s incredibly helpful in increasing ROI on pay-per-click (PPC) ads, and can make a big difference in how those ads show up in advertising.
Your Adwords’ quality score is so important that without it, you may have no idea that your ad or website is or isn’t doing well. It could be just what you need to help save time and money when it comes to keyword use!
The problem is this quality score can be challenging to understand. Especially with the complicated metrics and many factors that go into determining it.
How can you ensure your Adwords campaign is cost-effective? And also keep up with ad quality, keywords and landing pages?
Read on for all these answers and more!
What is Adwords’ Quality Score?
Adwords’ quality score is a rating appointed by Google. It specifies to advertisers how relevant and valuable their chosen keywords are to a person who sees your ad, along with pay-per-click.
A high-quality score commonly leads to better ad placement and lower costs.
The score is given on a 1-10 scale for each of the keywords in your account, and it’s determined based on 3 general factors: ads, keywords, and landing page. Each of these factors are examined for relevance.
With so many moving parts, you may also benefit from reading our post on why Google Ads accounts succeed and fail.
What factors affect an Adwords’ quality score?
The three given general score factors can be expanded on through each of the following:
- Click through rate (CTR): The rate determined by how often your ad is clicked in relation to the number of impressions.
- User experience and landing page quality: Together, your landing page performance and user experience can help to increase your quality score if properly optimized.
- Historical performance: Just like a credit score, Adwords’ quality score is determined by your previous performance.
- Relevance of keywords to the ad group: An ad group is a list of keywords that are used in an advertisement. The relevancy of these keywords can increase quality score as they are used by searchers to find your website.
- Relevancy of text in the ad: Similar to the relevancy of your keywords, the relevancy of the text in your ad is an important factor in your quality score.
Each of these more detailed quality score factors come together. Not only to determine the score, but to help you understand what you can do differently as an advertiser.
Making adjustments to each of these factors can help to increase traffic and gain clicks on your website.
What are the Benefits of Adwords’ Quality Score?
Each of these discussed factors can help your quality score (or hurt it). But at the end of the day, why does it really matter?
The truth is, quality score is a large aspect of how Google figures out your Ad rank. It helps the search engine to determine exactly what position your ad is going to hold in paid search results.
While you might think that bidding big is all you need to get your ad in the best ranking spot, your quality score is what actually helps it to rank first. And that can mean for a major win when it comes to driving traffic and getting sales.
Cost is also a major benefit to having a high Adwords quality score. Simply because you pay less for traffic and get more of it. A lower cost per conversion combined with an increased click-through-rate is almost a guaranteed win for the business benefiting from it.
Additionally, a high-quality score is a good indication that your website is mobile friendly and optimized for user experience. This can be beneficial to your business in other ways.
If this is something you would like to learn more about, you can read our best practices for PPC landing pages here.
How to Improve Your Adwords Quality Score Fast
With more information about what Adwords’ quality score is, and how increasing it can be a major benefit to you, let’s discuss exactly how you can do that.
Here are a few powerful ways to get your Adwords quality score up as quickly as possible.
Use Message Match from Keyword to Ad to Landing Page
We’ve established that landing pages and CTR can have an impact on quality score. So why not make sure your ad message matches the keyword and landing page perfectly?
The seamless process from a user typing in the keyword, seeing a result that’s clearly identified by their keyword, and then clicking on that ad to see a landing page full of their desired results can make a big difference in quality score. This is because this type of process makes for a great user experience and a higher CTR.
If users have to take multiple steps or are unclear of where they should be clicking then they are likely going to bounce from the page. Message match helps you to keep things down to as few steps as possible.
Use SKAGs to Improve Adwords Quality Scores
SKAGs stand for Single Keyword Ad Groups, and just might affect your quality score positively.
As you’re setting up a new Adwords campaign, Google will suggest 10-20 keywords in a single ad group. And when you think about it, this is pretty unhelpful advice.
Quality scores depend on anticipated CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience. Each of these is impossible to do with any of the keywords in a single ad group. This is because you can’t target all of them within a single group.
Generic ads aren’t going to attract high performing CTRs which is where SKAGs come in. You can create single keyword ad groups that are structured in a few ways.
You might use three different match types:
- [Green men’s tie]
- Green men’s tie
- “Green men’s tie”
- Or you could also use a single match type: “Green men’s tie”
Utilize Expanded Text Ads
When you’re trying to improve your quality score, standard Adwords ad lengths can make it difficult. This is because they are so limited. It can be challenging to fit your keywords in naturally to the short headline. That’s why it makes expanded text ads so great!
If you’ve haven’t edited your ads or have been using old ones for a while, then it’s likely you aren’t using fully-expanding text ads. Use the new updates to Adwords to help determine if expanded text ads will produce better results.
With some A/B testing, you’ll know whether the original text ad length or the expanded text ad length gives better results.
Conclusion
Figuring out ways to increase your Adwords quality score may not be as simple as making a few clicks and getting better results. But achieving that high-quality store is certainly made more possible with these tips.
Forget wasting valuable dollars and having your ads placed in less valuable positions. Put these tactics together and you’ll be well on your way to saving money! Not to mention, getting the quality score you deserve!
If you’d rather get help with increasing your Adwords quality score, Blue Water Marketing in Stuart, FL is here to assist you. Get in touch today to see what we can do for you!
