One of the underlying factors that plays a role in your campaign’s success is your Google Ads Quality Score. This is something Google lets you view in Google Ads, and it’s one of many things that Google looks at when deciding your ads placement.
With that in mind, it’s natural for marketers to rush to try and improve their scores. The only problem is that Google isn’t completely transparent about their algorithms. When it comes to the quality score, they do publicly offer guidance, but there are some hidden factors that aren’t well-known.
However, years of running Google Ads has led us to uncovering several things that influence AdWords quality score and in this blog post, we’ll be explaining what those are.
What is Google Ads Quality Score?
For anyone who is unfamiliar with this, your Google Ads Quality Score is a 1-10 rating determined by Google. When you start running ads on Google, two of the main factors that decide your ad placement are your bid and your quality score.
Obviously the higher your bid, the better chance you have of being on top. But if you don’t have a great quality score, this will influence your placement and competitors could outperform you based on that (even if they have a lower bid).
As we said above, there are hidden factors but the ones which Google openly state affect your quality score are:
- Ad relevance. How relevant is your ad to the keywords you’re bidding on?
- Click-Through-Rate. How many people who see your ad actually click on it?
- Landing page experience. Is the landing page relevant to the ad?
How to Improve Your Google AdWords Quality Score
Moving on, we’re going to show you the best ways to improve your Google Ads quality score. These 6 methods are based on our own experience and what we’ve found to work for our clients.
1. Understand the Factors
The first step is to understand what the different factors at play are. Knowing how to tackle these factors will increase your quality score and ultimately bring you more traffic. However, these factors can be tricky to manipulate as Google uses a very specific algorithm for weighing the impact of each factor.
It may seem complex at first, but learning how to use the AdWords quality score factors to your advantage will give you a better understanding of the algorithm not to mention it’ll help you achieve that higher score. Don’t worry, we’ll get into the specific factors too.
2. Work on Improving Your CTR
CTR (Click-Through-Rate) is simply the percentage of people who see your ad and click on it. This is a great indicator of how effective your ads are as well as whether or not you’re targeting the right keywords. If you target irrelevant keywords, your CTR will undoubtedly be lower.
Being specific in your keyword placement is very beneficial for increasing your CTR. Not only does it enable you to gets ads in front of your desired audience, but it gets your ads more clicks.
Let’s say someone’s searching online to buy a pair of dinosaur socks. If your ads are vague and only use terms like kids socks or socks for men, you won’t get that many clicks. One is too vague and one is irrelevant – specificity and relevance are crucial. When someone searches for dinosaur socks, the best way of getting their attention is with your keyword placement.
Additionally, try keeping your ads concise and to the point. Every word matters. Your ad copy needs to be well-thought-out and every word should ad value.
By doing this, you’ll convince more people to click on your ads, improving your CTR and thus improving your Google Ads quality score.
3. Do Better Keyword Research
We can’t emphasize the importance of the keywords you choose. Whether it’s SEO or PPC, keywords are part of your campaign’s foundation. If you rush the keyword research and do a sloppy job, your campaign is set to fail from the get-go.
Finding the right keywords is a challenge and can take time, but one option is to use PPC spy tools. Tools like SpyFu let you see what your competitors are doing – specifically, what keywords are they bidding on? Your competitors are no doubt doing their own research and these tools let you see the keywords they’ve been bidding on.
Top tip: if you see a competitor constantly running ads for a specific set of keywords, target those. The reason for this is that they’re getting good results from those keywords, and you can too.
By doing better keyword research you can find keywords that are better suited to your ads, and which are relevant, and this relevance will help improve your Google Ads quality score.
4. Use Negative Keywords
Google Ads also allows you to use negative keywords. These are keywords, or phrases, that specifically won’t trigger your ads. We said before that specific keyword usage can increase your CTR, and adding negative keywords can do this too.
By cutting away irrelevant keywords or keywords that are too broad, your ads will be shown to less people have very little interest in what you’re selling. In turn, your CTR will steadily increase even though you haven’t made changes to the ad directly.
Let’s go back to the dinosaur socks example. You might be bidding on the keyword dinosaur socks, but depending on your match type, your ad may appear if someone searches kids socks. Sure, there’s a chance that someone who searches the latter will be interested, but they won’t be as interested as someone who specifically searched dinosaur socks.
Alternatively, if you don’t use a negative keywords list, your CTR will decrease along with your Google Ads quality score.
5. Focus on Writing High-Quality Ad Copy
The next thing to focus on is your ad copy. This is without a doubt one of the most challenging aspects of creating Google Ads. You have to be concise while conveying a strong message, but you also need to keep your audience’s attention.
Concise ad copy should have no wasted words, as we mentioned before. To convey a strong message, relate to your audience’s problems. What problem are you solving for them, and why is your solution the best? Relate to them and you’ll have a better chance of winning them over.
Writing high-quality ad quality is a skill that takes a long time to pick up, so don’t lose hope if it’s something you initially struggle with. With better ad copy you’ll get more engagement, and your AdWords quality score will improve.
6. Improve Your Landing Page Design (+ Optimize!)
Although this isn’t a hugely influential factor, your landing page does contribute to the quality score. It’s just as important, if not more important, as creating a good ad. Once you get someone to click the ad, which is a challenge in itself, the landing page’s job is to convert them.
Assuming you’re targeting a new audience (Google Ads remarketing is a whole other barrel of fish), the landing page is your first impression. Your design needs to be attractive, of course, but it also needs to persuade your audience to convert. Whether it’s getting them to buy your product or sign up for a free trial, your landing page is responsible for turning users into viable customers.
So, how can you do this? That’s dependent on your business and what the ad’s goal is. If you’re in the SaaS space and want more sign ups, you could:
- Offer a free trial (without a credit card requirement)
- List scenarios where your software can help
- Specify the features your software has that competitors done
For more help with landing page design go ahead and watch our YouTube video which discusses it in more depth, as well as showing some examples which will inspire your own creativity.
Why Improving Your Google Ads Quality Score is Important
Some small businesses can get away with ignoring their quality score, but this isn’t a sustainable approach. As you grow, you’ll notice that no matter what you do, your ads aren’t performing as well as they could be. Although it isn’t likely that this is the sole reason, having a low quality score could be a reason.
For this reason, among others, our long-term goals need to include keeping your quality score high. It’ll do nothing but benefit you and, at the very least, even if you just follow our tips you’ll notice your ads performing better.
Conclusion
That sums up our guide on improving your Google Ads quality score, and hopefully you now have a better understanding of where you can improve your strategy. Even simple things like creating a negative keywords list can have a huge impact. On the other hand, overhauling your landing pages will also have an impact.
Don’t let a low AdWords quality score be the reason your ads perform badly. With a team of pros by your side, like KonvertLab, your quality score won’t be a concern any longer. Book a call with us below and we can discuss the specifics of how we can run your campaigns as well as what we’d do to improve your quality score.