What is Google Adwords Quality Score?

Google Adwords Quality Score measures the quality and relevance of your ad campaigns, keywords and landing pages from a visitor’s perspective. It is a dynamic variable calculated for each of your keywords. It reflects your keyword’s Click through Rate (CTR). A high Quality Score means your keywords are most relevant to the users’ search query and more effective for your ad campaigns. It also helps your ads to rank higher and reduce the Cost per Click (CPC).

How does Adwords Quality Score works?

Imagine yourself looking for an apartment near to any of the prime locations of your city with a car parking space. You type-in a search query on Google that says, “Buy apartments near South City with car parks.”  

So an ad that writes, “Apartments near South City”, might interest you. Plus if the ad contains two more lines saying, “Spacious 3 bhk Apartments, car park & lawns. Now 20% off on brokerage”, you may even click on it to know more about the offer. The landing page that you see elaborates the features of the offer and you get interested to see the flat. So, you dial the contact number of the estate agent, call him and book a visit to the demo flat.

In other words, you got exactly what you were looking for. Google aims to achieve the same  for every time and considers this as an ultimate user experience. Thus, Adwords Quality Score helps you to customize your ad campaigns, in order to give your visitors the same experience. So that they keep coming back to your site again and again.

Adwords Quality Score for each keyword is calculated looking at variety of factors. It might range from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest and 1 being the lowest. Higher the Quality Score, higher will be your ads position and lower will be the ad cost. This will eventually make your ad successful.

So now let’s discuss some tips that would help you increase your Adwords Quality Score. The image below, highlights the important factors that determine Quality score on Adwords.

Google adwords quality score tips to improve ad performance

Tips to Increase Adwords Quality Score:

1. Divide and Rule your Keywords:  Divide your keywords list into smaller and more targeted Ad groups. Better keyword grouping helps you get better quality score. Select 8-20 closely related keywords and insert them in a particular ad group.

For Example: If your business offer is about “Beautiful Beach Houses in Goa” you should group max. 20 keywords that are closely relevant. Like “buy beach houses in Goa” or “Goa beach houses for sale“, etc. You can see that the keywords have the terms ‘Goa’ and ‘Beach houses’ as the main denominators. Whereas the target customers are those who are at the verge of buying.

2. Relevance, Relevance, Relevance: It is utmost important that you keep the relevancy intact in the ad campaigns, keywords and the landing pages. Ad relevance, Keyword relevance, Search relevance, and the CTR are evaluated by Adwords to determine the Quality Score. Thus, without fail you have to stick to the main objective of the ad campaign and keep all the contents, keywords and messages relevant to each other.

Make sure you mention the objective clearly on your ad campaign and even on the landing page. Use the focus keyword (like ‘Beach Houses in Goa’) in your ad copy, display url, landing page headlines, text and SEO.

3. Good CTR is ‘Most Wanted’: Click through Rate is the most significant factor that influences the Adwords Quality Score. It measures the number of times your ad has received a click in comparison to the number of times it was shown on the page. The more targeted and relevant your ad is, the higher will be your CTR. High CTR will definitely increase your Adwords Quality Score. 

4. Experience of your Landing Pages: Adwords Quality Score is influenced by another important factor called Landing Page Experience. I have already discussed this point in another blog post. So, you can click on the link to read it.

5. One Copy for Each Ad: Create relevant ad copy for each ad group to help make your campaign more targeted. While you do that, do not forget to use the tips I have mentioned above (Tip #2). Match the title, ad text and display url and use the same keyword in them. Note that your display URL does not need to match the destination URL.

6. Test & Modify Ads in a Group: It is a good practice to create at least 2 or more ad copies for each ad group with different CTAs and message. This will help you test your ad copies better. You can opt to keep the best performing ad copy for the ad campaign while you delete the rest. Improve that ad copy to get more CTR and therefore increase your Adwords Quality score. Well, you should  keep all the ads running for a minimum of three to four weeks. This will help you collect enough data to compare their performance. 

7. Do it, the Geographic Way: The geographic location of your ad campaign and the target audience play a significant role in determining your Adwords Quality Score. Marketers must have experienced it quite a few times while campaigning for their product in different locations. Sometimes specific campaigns are more successful in one location. While it may fail to perform well in another. This happens because the product or service that the campaign offers may not be relevant or useful for people of that region. So you might receive less CTR and your Quality score might go down. This proves that choosing a specific location to run your ad campaigns is important.

So get going and make your ads more relevant. Start getting more clicks on your ads and take your business to new heights.

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