Optimizing your Google Ads Quality Score is an indispensable factor when it comes to getting your listing ads to show high on user's search results. Google Ads Quality Score is a measurement that Google uses to gauge the relevance of your keywords, ads, and landing pages to your target audience. In order to succeed in attracting users, learning the basics of Google Ads Quality Score is essential.
In this article, we’ll be discussing how Quality Score works and how it affects your overall ad performance. We'll also provide a couple of methods you can use to help improve your ad rank.
What is Google Ads Quality Score?
Google Ads Quality Score is a quality score formula and-based metric that determines the relevance of your ads to users, and it also gives advertisers an idea of how well their ad has quality scores and compares to other advertisers. With this in mind, Quality Score plays an important role that determines the success of your ads.
Quality Score is used to calculate Ad Rank, which is a major factor that advertisers should be aware of. Google Ads calculates the Ad Rank for every ad in an auction, determines whether your ads are eligible to be shown, and also evaluates the ad position used for the ad. So the higher the Ad Rank, the low quality score, the higher the possibility of your ads ranking highly in the placement.
Ad Rank is calculated based on the following formula:
Ad Rank = Quality Score x Bid
Let’s take a look at the graph below. We see that Company D has the lowest bid on the list yet it was still able to be first in placement ranking. On the other hand, Company A had the highest bid and yet was only ranked third. Looking at these examples, we can see that the ranking is not entirely determined by how high a bid may be.
The Importance of Quality Score in Ad Rank
It is important to remember that Ad Rank is determined by Quality Score and Bid when running listing ads. So if you are an advertiser, you will want to expect the most return even with a small budget.
Raising your Quality Score will make it much easier to get high placement rankings regardless if your bid is on the lower end.
Even if you keep the same ad budget, you'll be able to attract a large number of clicks because you'll be able to keep your bidding cost low.
Understanding these advantages in relation to raising your quality score is also an important thing to keep in mind.
3 Important Quality Score Factors in Google Ad Rank
Google Ads Quality Score is evaluated on a 10-point scale. The higher the score, the better, but what factors actually contribute to higher Quality Score? Let's take a look at 3 major factors that play a big role in raising Quality Score.
Expected Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The expected click-through rate responsive search ads is determined by taking into account your keyword's past placement results. The status is then graded as either above-average, average, and below-average. If your expected click-through rate happens to be rated below average, it wouldn’t hurt to check if your ad is enticing enough for users to click on them.
Ad Relevance
Ad Relevance is the status that shows the relevancy between a keyword and the message in your ad.
Just like the click-through rate, this status is also graded as above-average, average, or below-average. If your ad relevance status happens to be rated below average, make sure to use relevant keywords and useful keywords in your ad copy by choosing the right keywords and checking keyword relevance.
Landing Page Experience
A landing page is the web page where the ads are linked to. The landing page Quality Score is greatly influenced by whether the information that the user is looking for can be found on your landing page.
In addition, the ease with which you can find the signup form and company profile and landing page quality is also evaluated, so it’s important to make sure that the landing page where your ad is running is viewable and easy to operate. Also, just like the expected click-through rate and ad relevance status, the landing page experience status is also graded as either above-average, average, and below-average.
11 Tips on How to Improve Your Google Ad Rank Quality Score
With the basics keyword level quality score out of the way, let's look at 11 ways on how you can improve your ad for keyword quality scores score so you can aim for a higher ranking.
Improve Expected Click-Through Rate
As we have covered earlier, the expected click-through rate for same keyword is determined by taking into account the keyword's past placement results and click-through rate closely related keywords. You will need to acquire a good amount of clicks first in order to improve your expected click-through rate and successfully optimize an ad.
Tips:
1. Entice users with a compelling ad copy.
This includes optimizing the headline and copy. Make sure to use ad extensions as well. Ad extensions complement the ad by providing more messaging to users and relevant ad extensions will also help other ads grab attention as extensions increase the size of your ads.
Maintain Ad Relevance
To improve your ad quality score, you will have to make sure that you are providing relevant ads to users. Ad relevance is evaluated based on (1) the ad, (2) keywords, (3) and the landing page. Thus how to improve auction time ad quality score, we need to make improvements with these 3 factors in mind.
Tips:
2. Include relevant target keywords in your ad.
3. Create a relevant landing page by clearly displaying what you proposed in the ad.
4. Create an ad group that aligns other ad formats and groups with your keywords and ads.
Improve Landing Page Experience
Since Quality Score is also affected by the contents of the landing page you are linking to, you'll also need to both improve quality score and provide a relevant landing page.
Tips:
5. Ensure your text ads link to highly relevant landing pages ad relevant to.
6. Provide original content.
7. Display the product introduction page when delivering product-related ads.
8. Display general contents when delivering product comparison ads.
9. Create a company profile page to ensure business transparency.
10. Make sure the page is easy to navigate and is both PC and mobile-friendly.
11. Make sure page loading time is fast and the site is running smoothly.
What to Do If Improving Your Ad Rank Doesn’t Work
Let’s say you were finally able to get google ads account get your quality score up and placement rank to a fair point, but somehow you are still not seeing any of your products being purchased or decent conversions coming in. At this point, it might be good to suspect that you might be dealing with ad fraud.
In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of fraudsters stealing ad spend from companies running online ads. Since fraudsters can pose as legitimate users, it has become harder to distinguish whether an ad click is invalid or not.
If you've tried all the possible ways to optimize your ads but to no avail, and are currently caught up in what seems to be ad fraud, it would be difficult to get the ideal performance that you're expecting from your ads. For this reason, blocking fraudulent clicks and identifying whether you're a victim of ad fraud has become the norm for careful web advertisers.
Conclusion
Even on a low budget, your ads will still have the chance to show high on the top of search engine results pages as long as you maintain good Quality Score by regularly optimizing your ads, keywords, and landing pages. So to conclude, let’s look back at how you can improve your Quality Score:
1. Entice users with a compelling ad copy.
2. Include relevant target keywords in your ad.
3. Create a relevant landing page by clearly displaying what you proposed in the ad.
4. Create an ad group that aligns with your keywords and ads.
5. Ensure your text ads link to highly relevant landing pages.
6. Provide original content.
7. Display the product introduction page when delivering product-related ads.
8. Display general contents when delivering product comparison ads.
9. Create a company profile page to ensure business transparency.
10. Make sure the page is easy to navigate and is both PC and mobile-friendly.
11. Make sure page loading time is fast and the site is running smoothly.
If you’re already getting a decent amount of clicks from your ads after testing the tips above, yet still see yourself stuck with non-converting users, there is a good chance that you may be dealing with ad fraud.
Ad fraud doesn't only waste your valuable ad budget, it also causes ad performance issues. Check out our 14 days free trial to identify and stop ad fraud. Start seeing the campaign performance you deserve!
