What Is Quality Score and How Does It Increase Your Google Ads ROI?
There’s a lot that goes into determining the overall success of your Google Ads campaign, from picking and omitting the right campaign keywords to winning the Google Ads bidding process and optimizing your campaign’s targeting settings.
But there’s one more part that plays a fundamental role in determining how much you pay for each click you receive and where your ads rank on Google’s results pages.
Enter: Google’s Quality Score.
In this article, you’ll learn what it is, how you can approximate your ad’s score, and what you can do to make sure your Quality Score is as high as possible.
What is Google’s Quality Score and Why Is It Relevant for Google Ads?
In the simplest of terms, “Quality Score” is a metric used by Google Ads to assess the quality and relevance of your keywords and ads.
There are three big questions that need answering when it comes to Quality Score.
Question 1: Why is Quality Score important?
Because it’s the main factor in determining your ad rank and cost-per-click (CPC) for a particular keyword in the ad auction process.
Question 2: Why does Google do this?
Because, as a search engine, Google is constantly prioritizing providing relevant, high-quality search results for the terms you type in (as well as the 8.5 billion others it processes each day).
You can think of Quality Score as an incentive from Google to make sure ad relevance and quality stay high. After all, Google needs its searchers to keep searching with it, so serving them relevant, high-quality content is essential to their business model.
But remember, there’s also a benefit for you if you keep your Quality Score high.
The more relevant your content is, the more it’ll be shown to searchers. The more it’s shown to searchers, the more clicks you’ll get. And, the more clicks you get, the lower your cost-per-click is going to be.
Question 3: What is a good Quality Score?
Google Ads Quality Scores rate each keyword and campaign out of ten. You can find your ad’s quality score in your Google Ads account.
Anything lower than 5 would traditionally mean your cost-per-click is probably higher than what it should be and that there’s something wrong. Traditionally, these would be the numbers you’d want, but read our Pro Tip below, to show why this isn’t always the case.
On the other hand, getting a Quality Score of 10 would be virtually unheard of.
Getting a 9 or an 8 is possible, but that’s mostly with branded keywords (like your coworking space’s name) where there’s virtually no other result that could turn up that is more relevant than yours.
Pro Tip:
If you’re using custom landing pages with your Google Ads—which is something we do at Spacefully to optimize your ad performance—your Quality Score can be skewed. This doesn’t mean your campaign is underperforming—on the contrary, we’ve seen incredibly successful campaigns with lower quality scores. It’s just that your Quality Score doesn’t always show the full picture of what’s going on. So, it’s important to look at other, more definitive metrics for measuring the success of your campaign, such as your lead volume, cost-per-lead, and number of conversions.
Understand your metrics using our Blueprint Strategy.
How Can You Calculate Your Quality Score?
If you’ve read much of our blog content, you probably know that the answer to this question is something along the lines of…
“Well, in typical Google fashion, it’s all a bit ambiguous, and there’s no set way to calculate your Quality Score.”
With that being said, though, there are a few factors that can have an impact.
Landing Page Experience
The actual user experience of your landing page can impact your Quality Score, and this includes things like:
- Website speed
- Website content relevancy
- Ensuring every element on your website supports your final goal of increasing leads
Put yourself in a searcher’s shoes: if you land on a website, it’s slow to load, and the content of the site doesn’t really line up with what you’re looking for, it’s ultimately a pretty bad experience.
Google will penalize you for that.
Ad Relevance
This pertains to how relevant your ad content is for the duration of the user experience.
Expected Clickthrough Rate
Google’s way of determining how well-optimized your keywords and ads are and how relevant they are to your landing page.
What Steps Can You Take to Improve Your Quality Score?
Like most things with Google, improving your quality score is an exact science—but it’s one that Google keeps to itself and doesn’t provide you with the formula for.
Luckily, there are some proven steps you can take to improve your Quality Score.
Consistency and Cohesion
In order to ensure your ad is relevant, there must be a cohesive flow from your keywords to your ads to your landing page.
This means you need to have consistent messaging between ads, keyword bids, and landing pages—the keywords you bid for must correspond with your ads, and your ads must contain your keywords.
For example, this can include doing ongoing reviews of your users’ searches and filtering out any irrelevant searches (things like “offices for sale” should be excluded).
It can also extend to ensuring that your landing page contains your primary keywords as the first thing users will see as soon as they click on your landing page rather than burying them way down the page.
Landing Page Best Practices
At Spacefully, we run individual ad campaigns (known as Tracks) for individual services. And, for each service and Track, we create a dedicated landing page.
And that’s because it allows searchers to find exactly and only what they’re searching for and makes it easy for them to sign up—but also because it allows us to maintain control over your visitor’s landing page experience, ad relevance, and consistency and cohesion.
When it comes to creating landing pages, it’s important to follow a few best practices. Your landing page must:
- Be captivating, relevant, and have a strategic website path that leads users to engage with you through email leads or calling
- Have consistent calls to action throughout the page
- Contain captivating imagery, showcasing unique service offering, and answer primary questions that will allow you to filter through irrelevant leads
- Be tailored to one service
- Contain focused messaging that speaks to the specific service that the user is searching for in order to improve their experience on your site
Google can be unpredictable. The way they optimize is constantly changing, leaving everyone to scramble to keep up.
So, ultimately, Quality Score is a process, not a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor. It requires ongoing review, analysis, and iteration to ensure your ads are relevant and high-quality.
But by taking steps to get it right, you can make sure your ad ranks higher, your budget goes further, and you get more potential members touring your coworking space.
Want to learn how we can supercharge your quality score? Book a free introductory call today to learn how we can help ensure your Google Ads Quality Score is as high as possible.
