How to Improve Your Google Ads Quality Score

Google Ads is the most important online advertising platform in the search engine market, but before we dive into how to improve the Google Ads Quality Score, let’s uncover what Google Ads Quality Score is.

What is Google Ads Quality Score?

Your Google Ads Quality Score is a measure of the quality, relevance, and performance of the ads in your pay-per-click (PPC) online campaigns. You quality score affects two key metrics for a successful ad campaign on Google Ads:

• the position of your ads when there are multiple ads for a keyword
• your cost per action (CPA)

In other words, your Google Quality Score (previously known as AdWords Quality Score) has a major impact on your online campaign’s success and profitability.

There are a number of uncontrollable variables in paid search advertising, but luckily, you are able to affect your Google Ads Quality Score and can take steps to improve it!

Proper Google Ads campaign management and organization can increase your Quality Score in several ways:

• Better keyword data: With regular keyword research using Google Keyword Planner, you can build your campaigns on the right foundation, ultimately increasing the relevancy of your keywords to your ad campaign.
• Effective account structure: Organizing keywords into small, tightly related groups is crucial to achieve a high Quality Score. This practice makes it much easier to create specific ads and landing pages targeted to your intended audience.
• More relevant ads: Google rank ads higher that are compelling and speak to the searcher’s query, which increase your click-through rate (CTR). High CTR is the fastest path to a higher Quality Score and lower costs per click (CPC).

A High Quality Score Begins with Keywords

Like most other things with Google, keywords are the foundation of your Google Ads activities—if your keyword research is weak, your whole Google Ads account will suffer and the performance of your online campaigns will follow. That is why hiring a Google Ads agency is a pretty good idea.

Most search marketers depend on free keyword tools to build their PPC keyword lists. This can really harm your Quality Score because you have no way of knowing if the keywords that these tools spit out are truly relevant to your business and customers or not.

Instead, Google Search Console and generally your own web analytics and log files are a much better source of keyword data. These private sources tell you the actual words and phrases that real people use to find the products and/or services you offer. You’ll also have an accurate picture of which keywords drive the most traffic and conversions, so you can focus your ad campaign’s efforts on this first and foremost, without making guesses based on general global data.

Using the right keywords in your ads not only improves your rankings, it catches the eyes of potential customers to increase CTR. This, in turn, further improves your Quality Score—so you continue to get more exposure at a lower cost.

Other Factors to Obtain A High Quality Score

Beyond identifying the right keywords for your ad campaign, Google Ads Quality Score depends on several factors.

Google has always been very secretive about how their algorithms work (it is their secret sauce after all!), but indicators paint a clear picture. For your ad to score a high relevance score—which leads to a higher Quality Score—there are four paramount things to get right:

• The relevance of your ad to the keyword
• The relevance of your ad to your landing page, website or app that you link to
• The historical performance of your Google Ads account
• The click-through rate of your ad

If you get these right, your ads’ relevance score will skyrocket, and your Google Ads Quality Score will soon follow!