Google Quality Score Formula: Everything You Need to Know for Optimizing Google Ads
You have placed a Google ad and written sophisticated content for your ad. The next thing you know, you paid a lot for it but yielded little result. One of the possible explanations is that the keywords you placed are not relevant to what searchers are looking for.
This is when you need to start paying attention to Google Quality Score, as it is the weapon for successful Google PPC advertising. If you are new to this term, no worries, as we are here to dissect the formula for Google Quality Score, introduce the pathway to monitor your latest score, and suggest practices to improve your quality score.
What is Google Quality Score?
But first, what is Google Quality Score exactly, and why is it so important?
In case you don't know, Google Search works on an auction basis – every time a user searches a keyword on Google, it holds an auction to decide which ads would show up and how they would be ranked. Ad Rank largely depends on your bidding and quality of ads, while Quality Score is a keyword-based algorithm that relies on historical data and estimates the quality and relevance of both PPC ads and landing pages based on keywords you have set. To put it simply, every keyword you choose to be included in your ads is given a quality score to decide if your campaigns and landing pages are relevant to the searcher’s intentions while doing a Google Search. The higher the Quality Score, the higher the chance for ads to be placed in the top position. This illustrates how Quality Score affects CPC (cost-per-click), driving down advertising cost and lowering your cost-per-conversion (cost of your advertisement).
Understanding the distinction between Ad Rank vs Quality Score is crucial: Google Quality Score does not decide your ad rank during the real-time auction; it is a tool for marketers to understand and estimate how well the ads will perform based on historical statistics, and what aspect(s) need improvement for better ad performance.
All About the Google Quality Score Formula
To start, no one truly understands the algorithm behind Google Quality Score calculations, as Google keeps it tightly under wraps. But there is some information out in the open that could give marketers a hint on how to improve ad quality.
There are three main factors affecting your Google Quality Score: Ad Relevance, Expected Click-through Rate (CTR), and Landing Page Experience. In Google Ads, the three dimensions are measured in a three-tiered scoring system: below average, average and above average. Google compiles the score for each individual factor and comes up with the final quality score for the ad, which is scored from 1- 10 (with 10 being the finest in quality of ad). And if you were wondering what a good quality score is for Google Ads, a score of 7 or higher is generally considered great.
Now, we will go through these three factors for you to have a better understanding before delving into the actual Google Quality Score formula:
1. Expected Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Although not specified by Google, it is believed that expected CTR plays the most important role when calculating Google Quality Score. Expected CTR is the projection of how likely the ad will be clicked, solely based on past keyword performance. Other factors, like ad formats and extensions that could affect the visibility of ads, would not be taken into consideration. During the real-time auction, a more accurate expected CTR is calculated based on the search term, type of device, and factor specified to the particular search. A low expected click-through rate means the keywords targeted might not be relevant to users' search queries, or that the ad’s contents are not highly connected to your major keywords. High performance in click-through rate can not only increase the relevance of ads (leading to higher conversion rates) but also act as a prediction of the future performance of your ads.
2. Landing Page Experience
Landing page experience indicates whether your landing page is useful and clear for users who click into your ads. It is a fairly important factor as it establishes first impressions about your offerings, which depend on how you deliver your products and services on the page. An efficient landing page should:
- Be relevant to the keywords/ads you displayed for
- Match and provide solutions to users’ search intents
- Be easy and offer convenience for users to navigate throughout the website
- Provide a smooth experience that maximizes the chance of conversion
- Be transparent about the nature of its business
- State clearly how they handle users' personal information
A bad landing page experience would hurt the chance in converting businesses and make the PPC marketing campaign less efficient. It is a great opportunity for businesses to examine which landing page is performing poorly and decide what needs to be modified (if not removed entirely from the ad).
3. Ad Relevance
Ad relevance suggests how relevant the ad is to the keywords that users are searching for. It also ensures that businesses are unable to pay for exposure under unrelated searches. Low ad relevance suggests the ads are using keywords that are too generic and broad, which are unable to target core audiences.
If the system indicates your ad relevance is below average, it means your ad or keyword might be too broad, or your ad group might include too many topics.
Optimizing Google Ads: How to Check Your Google Quality Score
Now that you know more about the components of a good Google Quality Score, the next question you may have could be: how to check your ads' Google Quality Score? Google Ads does provide a powerful backstage for marketers to update ad details and to check ad progress, check out the steps below to understand how to check your Quality Score on Google Ads:
1. Launch the Google Ads homepage and click on the “Campaigns” icon on the left.
2. Click “Audiences, keywords, and content”. Then, click on “Keywords”
3. In the upper right corner of the table, click the columns icon.
4. Under “Modify columns for keywords”, locate the “Quality Score” section, then click on the drop-down arrow to expand.
5. To add the current Quality Score and its component statuses as new columns in the keyword reporting table, select any of the following:
- Quality Score
- Landing Page Exp
- Exp. CTR
- Ad Relevance
6. If you want to view past Quality Score stats for the reporting period you’re looking at, choose any of the following metrics.
- Quality Score (hist.)
- Landing Page Exper. (hist.)
- Ad Relevance (hist.)
- Exp. CTR. (hist.)
7. Click Apply. Go back to the overview, you should now be able to check out your Google Quality Score and the component scores for each individual keyword.
How to Improve Google Quality Score
After checking your data, you realize the fabled Google Quality Score formula has not been kind to you. At least one of the three components is/are below average. What now? Don’t worry, for the last part of the article, we are here to share with you some tips on how to improve your Google Quality Score and perform better on Google Ads.
1. Keyword Optimization
a. Keyword Optimization Tools
Keyword planning plays an essential part in making your ads successful. Do more research on keywords and find ones that are relevant to your offerings and target audiences. There are some free and public tools, such as Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner, that you can use for brainstorming, but we do encourage you to hire professionals for a more in-depth keyword planning.
b. Use Long-Tail Keywords
One way to make your keywords more relevant to your ad is to make good use of long-tail keywords instead of using general keywords. Long-tail keywords refer to longer and more specific keywords. They are less competitive, which means you can set a lower bid budget. They may also match your audience’s search intent better, resulting in higher conversions. In contrast, although using general keywords might bring you higher exposure, they also tend to attract an unrelated audience. Since Google Ads is paid on a cost-per-click basis, using this would result in a higher cost of advertising and yield a lower ROI.
Let us demonstrate with an example: say you are selling commercial sliding chest freezers. “Refrigerator” would be a general keyword here and is not recommended for your ad, as people searching for a refrigerator could be households looking for domestic fridge purchases. To better target your audience, try long-tail keywords like “commercial display sliding chest freezer” to increase the relevance of your ad.
c. Make Use of Negative Keywords
Another keyword trick is to make good use of negative keywords, which prevent your ad from showing up on unwanted searches. One simple way to determine irrelevant keywords is to visit the “Keywords” page on Google Ads to see your keywords’ performance, including number of clicks initiated and conversion rate; choose those with low performance and add them to your negative keyword list.
Coming back to the example earlier, when managing your ad for sliding chest freezers, you might want to add negative keywords like “domestic refrigerator” to your list to avoid household audiences from being driven to your ad.
There are a lot more tricks you can learn for creating great ad keywords, too many that one article could not explain it all. But if you’re interested in reading more in-depth about keywords and keyword research, you can take a look at our article “How To Choose The Best Keywords For Your Digital Campaigns?” to learn more.
At OptAdEasy, we have a comprehensive tool with an easy user interface to generate keywords for Google Ads optimization. Start your free trial now!
2. Enhance Your Landing Page Design
There are several aspects you can pay attention to when designing an efficient landing page:
a. Optimize Site Speed
If your site speed is slow, take down extra media or compress the sizes of pictures to make sure no extra burden is put on your page.
b. Create a Landing Page for Each Individual Ad Group
Different ad groups have their own agenda when searching queries. People lack patience in exploring every column on your page, so if they enter a page and are unable to find the key product they are looking for, chances are they will leave the page almost immediately. Utilize all the pages you have on your website to direct each ad group to the most relevant and conversion-optimized landing page to increase the chance of conversion, instead of making your homepage the landing page for every ad campaign.
Take this example of YSL: when users search for “YSL Lipstick” on Google, the first official landing page directs users to its lipstick collections, with a design that makes checkout progress easier.
c. Make Your Landing Page Legit and Transparent
Explicitly state your offerings and business nature to give a clear impression to visitors. Make contact information, like phone number and address, visible on your page. Also, try to state clearly the privacy policies of your website to let visitors know how their personal data is being used and protected. These practices ensure a sense of trust from visitors’ eyes, which ultimately establishes a better landing page experience.
Some websites use cookie popups to explain the purpose of personal data collection and give visitors a choice to accept or reject cookie settings. This creates a better landing page experience by making their privacy policy transparent to visitors.
3. Find Your Local Customers
There is a function on Google Ads to target users in specific areas. This increases both the ad relevancy and expected CTR of your ads as they are shown to potential customers who are of greater interest in your products, especially if you own a physical store. Depending on your needs, you can choose to target specific countries, areas within the country, or a radius around a specific location. Other than using locational targeting, you can also use language to filter unrelated audiences to increase your expected CTR.
4. Constantly Refine Text Ads
To create higher-quality content, update your text ads from time to time, or create different ad copies for a campaign for higher relevancy and click-through rate.
You can do so by A/B testing different call-to-action phrases to maximize visitors’ reaction towards your ad. Does “Get your 50% off now!” attract a higher click-through rate, or does “Enjoy your limited time Buy-One-Get-One-Free Offer” perform better? Regularly check your Google Quality Score whenever there is a change in phrasing to better know about your targeted audience’s preferences.
Also, include time-specific ad text. As the season changes, your business might offer different sales promotions or products. For example, if you are running a flower shop, the types of flowers and sales campaigns vary from season to season. Make sure your ad text is updated to drive more relevant traffic.
Google Quality Score could be very confusing and complicated. Leave your Google Search Ads in the hands of professionals—our team of experts is here for you. Get a free account now!
