What’s the Google Ads Quality Score?

The Quality Score can be broken down into several components. A number from 1 to 10 is the highest, while the lowest score is 1. 

The score is a fraction that is rated starting at the highest possible number. 

You may be thinking “Wait! Does your…keyword have a Quality Score? Correct. Quality Score is placed onto your…keyword. It refers to how relevant Google considers the keyword about your landing page or ad.

The Quality Score is affected by many factors. These factors will be discussed in the strategy discussion.

What’s the significance of a quality score?

Google is dedicated to providing the best search results to its users. Google must collaborate closely with advertisers to ensure that ads are included alongside the normal search results.

Google can’t assume that advertisers know the relevance of their ads. Google tells you what it thinks about your ad.

This is a simple example: If you have a keyword for “fishing pole”, and your ad is about cakes, but your landing page and keywords are all about ski boots, you will get a low-Quality Score. 

What does all this mean? Google and you share the same goal for your ads: to get a high-quality score that will not confuse or trick your customers.

However, Quality Score is more than just important for customer satisfaction. Quality Score also has an impact on the price you pay.

Your Cost per Click is affected by your Quality Score

Yes, that’s correct. Your Google Quality Score will directly affect the price per click you pay.

Quick Side Note: This does not affect your cost per conversion. The more you pay per click, however, the higher your quality score.

WordStream shows how your Quality Score is related to your CPC.

This means that you can pay less per click if your Quality Score is 10/10. 

If Quality Score is not important to you, then you may be happy with a 3-click price. The yellow frowny face reflects everyone’s views on paying more.

Ad Rank refers to the number of times your ad appears within Google Search Results. Now let’s look at the differences.

Quality Score vs. Ad Rank

Quality Score is the number that ranks your advertisement’s relevancy and landing pages with the keyword you are bidding for.

Ad Rank, however, is a combination of several factors, including Quality Score. This is a breakdown of Ad Rank’s components.

Bid – This refers to your bid (not CPC). It tells Google how much money you are willing to pay per keyword click.

Sometimes the highest bid does not win 

It is easy to believe that if my bids are higher than those of my competitors, then my ads will rank first and outperform everyone else. This is false. If the highest bidder won every Google auction, then the ads would dominate.

Quality Score – This is a simple way to see how your AdRank affects your quality score. Google agrees. The rank of an advertisement can be affected by its quality score.

Ad Formats – How diverse are your ad formats?

Real-Time Ad Rank Calculation

Google search can be quite complicated. Let’s take a look at Ad Ranking and how Quality Score is tied to it. 

Let’s say you search for “quickdraw set” in Google. Then, it will search through all available ads to find the most relevant ads. This is where the fun starts.

Google looks first at the bids. If you bid $3.00 on a keyword that is worth $50.00,

Google will assess each person’s quality score to determine if they are eligible to bid correctly, relevantly, and accurately. Google then ranks your ad extension impacts from low (no ad format available) to high (many ad extensions).

Google will then decide which ad should appear in which position. 

How do you check your Quality Score?

There are two ways to evaluate your Quality Score. This can be viewed either in your account or in reports.

Quality Score Report

Google Ads Reports is a wonderful feature. In seconds, you can compare scores between accounts at different times and share your results with the rest of the world.

Go to Reports from the upper-right corner of your Google Ads account. The screen will change.

Where can I find reports?

Click Custom to start building your report. Add any additional information that you would like to see.

View your Quality Score through Your Account

Open your Google Ads account and click on your keywords in the second column. 

Take a peek at your keywords

Next, you can check the Status column of your keywords. This column will tell you if the keyword is eligible to be placed in ad spaces or if it has any immediate issues such as low search volume and lower first-page bidding, paused, etc.

Optional Keyword Status

Each keyword has a status. It is possible to see which factors have affected the score.

Click the Eligible button to view your Quality Score

Let’s discuss these factors.

Details of the Google Ads Quality Score

The Quality Score you get directly impacts three major factors. It is so easy to achieve a Quality Score.

You don’t know what you are doing

You’ll have to wait until the end before drawing such conclusions. Just as Scar didn’t know his true nature, so does Quality Score.

Official Factors to the Quality Score

These Google factors are claimed to affect your Quality score. They directly impact your Quality score.

Direct from Google

Expected Click Through Rates (CTR)

Google can predict how many people will click on your ad, and click it when they see it. This is the expected CTR. Google examines past keyword performance to predict how many people will click your ad and click it when they see it.

Ad Relevance

Google will review the ads you have written to find out how close they are to search terms. The keyword will be mentioned later.

Experience Landing Page

You might wonder, “What does my Google keyword page have to do with my landing page?” Answer: All. Google does not have all the answers.

Unofficial Factors

Now that we’ve seen how Google’s Quality Score affects yours, let’s look at what factors impact those variables. Take a deep breath.

Click-Through

The Click-through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who click on your ad.

While your Google Account says that your expected click-through rate is a key determinant of quality, your actual CTR can make a big difference.

Remember that the expected CTR is partly calculated using the keyword’s history. Your past is also considered in this calculation. If you increase your CTR, your Quality Score will likely rise.

Historical CTR Performance

This does not reflect the click-through rates you receive for particular keywords. Your historical CTR performance is your historical CTR.

Let’s say you have been running ads for two years. Your CTR is high. You have strong ads that are paired with relevant keywords. Your ads are clicked on most days.

Next, you’ll want to do keyword expansion. Google reviews your account’s CTR history to determine if it has the expected CTR score.

You should note that your historical data will stay with you for all time. Google will still hold information about the keyword and include it in your historical CTR performance

Long-Tail Keywords

The CTR for long-tail keywords is higher than for shorter keywords. However, longer keywords have a greater impression share than short keywords. However, users who search for them tend to be more specific.

Let’s say you’re bidding on the term furnace. It might not be a good idea to bid for high-Quality Scores. There will likely be many keywords related to furnaces.

Not all search terms are relevant

More. If you’re a furnace repair company, these results won’t be useful. You will also see a decrease in your CTR.

You should not bid on furnaces. You can instead bid on furnace installation or repair.

Day of the Week

Time is a key factor that can affect your CTR. Advertisements that are run 24 hours a day might have lower CTRs.

Tracking your conversions over time is normal. Your CTR could be low.

CTR drops can affect your CTR and make your ads less effective. You can also test different days or weeks to see if your CTR has improved.

Bounce Rate

Let’s get to the landing page experience. Not only Google Ads, but many other factors also play a role in landing page experiences.

Let’s start with the bounce rates. This refers to the number of people who click on your ad and then click the back button to return search results. Although mistakes and misclicks can be prevented, they should only make up a small percentage of clicks.

Combine your Google Analytics account and Google Ads to see your bounce rate. Google calculates bounces in the overall landing page experience.

If your bounce rate is high, you should review your landing page. Quality landing pages are important for customers to spend time on and convert to your offers.

Load Time of the Landing Page    

Have you ever clicked on a link, waited…and waited for it to load? That experience is rare.

Google knows that people expect websites to load quickly. Google strives for less than half a second.

The speed at which loads can be affected depends on your internet speed and geographic location. Speeding up your load time will make your landing pages more enjoyable and improve your quality score.

To test your website’s load time, enter your URL in Google’s page speed insight.

The Landing Page is simple to understand

People are curious about what the next step is. People enjoy being able to easily navigate new landing pages.

They want their landing pages to be easy to navigate. 

Your website should contain information about your products and services 

Google reviews landing page designs using both humans and computers.

Links to the Landing Page

It’s possible for someone to not be familiar with your landing pages when they first visit them. Google encourages trust and transparency by allowing key information to be linked to the website.

Link to your landing pages to show your authenticity. 

There are many options for where to navigate. You can also see links to their contact and social media pages.

This encourages landing page experience and overall Quality Score.

Crawlability Landing Page Text    

Google inspects landing pages using a mixture of bots and humans as described above. To view the content, the bots will visit the page you have provided

It will look at all information on your site. Make sure that there is no programming that prevents bots from crawling it.

Google will easily be able to crawl your site, making it easier to create better landing pages.

Device Performance

Did you know that ads perform differently across different devices? You can check the performance of your ads on mobile, desktop, and tablet devices by visiting your Google Ads account and clicking on the Devices section or an ad group, then clicking on the Performance tab

Your Quality Score could vary depending on how your ads perform on different devices. 

Monitor the performance of every device to see if they are slowing you down. If your campaign is not getting clicks from tablets, consider making bid adjustments.

Factors that don’t affect your quality score

There are many myths about what factors can or cannot impact your Quality score. 

Your Bid

Your bid can affect your ad rank, as we have discussed in the section Ad Rank. This does not affect your Quality Score.

Google bids independently from the Quality Score. You could compare it to being able to bribe Google. 

It is a good idea for companies to spend time on quality assurance. 

Keyword Match Types

First, let me clarify the Quality Score. This will rank your keyword, landing page, and ad’s relevancy. What relevance does this have to search terms?

The keyword match type does not affect your Quality Score. Keywords must be relevant to search terms for as long as maintenance and optimization are done.

Some people suggested that you only use exact-match keywords. I understand their reasoning.

Balance is key. Using it as an exact match keyword to high-intent keywords may help increase your Quality Score or CTR. You may have limited options.

Pausing & Deleting Poor Keywords

Consider how your account’s conversion rate has affected your expected CTR. Your keywords didn’t have a good CTR.

These keywords might have been too broad or not the intended search intent. The problem is solved. While that keyword is now gone, the rest of your account continues its decline.

Google will still include a keyword’s CTR in its analysis of your historical CTR.

You decide to delete it. Google isn’t available for that.

Yes, deleted or paused keywords can retain their CTR memory Google uses this information to calculate your expected CTR. To overcome your horrible CTR, you must increase the CTR for keywords.

Negative Keywords

While I don’t understand how negative keywords can impact your Quality Score, I can tell you that it can. To prevent your ads from showing up for low-quality search terms, add negative keywords.

Poor-quality search terms may trigger ads, but not get clicks. You can add negative keywords to increase your chances of an ad being triggered by high-quality search terms.

This will increase your CTR and indirectly your quality score But, adding negative keywords to your Quality Score won’t directly affect it.

Keywords for Landing Pages

Your landing page should be relevant to search terms used by visitors to it.

Conversion rates

It would make a great difference if conversion rates could automatically increase your Quality Score. 

Google Ads allows you to track any conversion. This feature is an amazing one of Google Ads. Google Ads can track any conversion you want.

Google doesn’t care how many conversions they make. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. 

Google cannot consider conversion rates as the Quality Score is a measurement tool that measures all accounts. This would be absurd to include in the Quality Score.

Ads per keyword

If you speak with a Google Ads Rep, they will insist that at least two (now three!) ads are running in opposition to each other. Kobe Digital prefers at least two ads running simultaneously for A/B test.

It isn’t true that you can get more keywords to improve your Quality Score. It doesn’t take extra effort to improve their Quality Score. We would start ad testing for that company.

Strategies to Increase Your Google Ads Quality Score

There are many ways to increase your Google Ads Quality Score.

You should focus on items that directly affect your Quality Score. You need to improve your landing page, make sure your ads are relevant, and monitor your CTR performance.

The structure of your account is a key determinant of your Quality Score. 

Account changes can improve your Quality Score, and performance.

Lower your Keyword to Ad Ratio

Your keywords and ads are separated into an ad group. You can choose to display any of the ads in that ad group for any keyword.

You should conclude that the more keywords you have in an ad group, the less specific your ads must appear. If your keywords start to differentiate in intent or subject,

Let’s say someone is searching for a particular item such as a baseball hat. Your CTR and Quality Score are lower so there will be fewer clicks.

You don’t have to limit the number of campaigns or ad groups you can add to your account. The ads in the ad group correspond to search terms and keywords.

Lower your search term-to-keyword ratio

Consider the purpose of your Google Ads account. You’re bidding on keywords.

Search terms are what you pay for. It is possible that one keyword won’t be relevant to more than 100 search terms.

Search terms can quickly drain your budget as they are the result of what you pay. 

Open your weekly SEO search term report. Depending on the keyword match type, there will be different numbers of keywords that are found.

When you’re looking through the report, be sure to look out for any keywords that are not worth paying. These keywords can lower your CTR.

Keep your search terms relevant to improve your CTR and Quality Score.

Geographic campaigns are worth looking at

Different devices may have different performance levels and therefore differ in Quality Scores. This applies to geographical locations.

While you can target specific geographic areas and adjust your bids using Google Ads, it’s not possible to see the Quality Score of each location at a glance.

Different geographic locations may perform differently. You might be surprised to find that ads that work well in Utah may not work in Mississippi.

You can easily see what needs to change when you break down your campaigns into different locations. You can increase your account performance and quality score by adjusting specifics location by location.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Dynamic keyword insertion can be used to create ad strategies or account strategies. These will make your ads more relevant to the user’s search terms.

Keep in mind that the code inserts keywords, not search terms. Make sure that your keywords are relevant to the ads and that they make sense within the context.

It will not directly impact your quality score. 

Only one keyword in your ad group

The most important thing was not included.

If you’ve never heard of SKAGs, it’s time to get familiar with them.

In example:

Ad Group Name: Auto Belay Device

Keywords:

• +auto +belay +device
• “Auto-belay device”
• [Auto-belay device]

This is all. The “Belay device”, The “Auto locking device”, will be in another ad group. These three keywords will only appear in the ad groups.

This allows you to make your ads as specific for this ad category as possible. That would be absurd.

All your ads, keywords, and landing pages will be relevant to the search terms being searched. It is possible to improve your Quality Scores with a simple reorganization.

Google Quality Scoring: The Big But

You might have done some research on Quality Scores. You may think you want to impress Google by getting the highest quality score. Be careful.

Let’s go back to the beginning. When you first opened a Google Ads Account, you didn’t consider your Quality Score. Your clients are what you are trying to make money for.

Your ability to make money is not affected

No matter how much you try, don’t obsess over your Quality Score. It is something we encourage.

KPIs are conversion rates, conversion prices, lifetime value, return on advertising spend, and so on. Remember what is most important.

One last note on quality scores

This is the most common response to a high score.

This is an error. 

We hope that you have found some helpful tips and tricks to improve your Google Ads account performance.