What is the Google Ads Quality Score and Why Does it Matter?

The ongoing quest for any ads campaign is to get more results for less. If you’re running Google Ads your Quality Score is a big player in getting seen more often, higher up the page, without necessarily paying the highest bid.

What is the Quality Score?

It’s key to remember that Google isn’t primarily an ads platform, it is the world’s most popular search engine, an accolade which hangs on the quality of its user experience. It keenly protects this with a Quality Score for paid results, ensuring that putting money behind a search term doesn’t lower the user experience.

The score is ranked out of ten and can be found in Keyword level > Search Keywords (if it doesn’t appear as a column here you can add it using the columns button).

Google ranks every keyword and the ad you put against that keyword. The higher the score

✔️  the more likely it will get shown

✔️  the higher you will be on the page

✔️  the less you will have to bid

What impacts the Quality Score?

The three keys points to pay attention to are

• Click Through Rate

• The relevance of your ad to the search term

• Landing page experience

Keeping your ads optimised, weeding out low performers and testing new ads should keep your CTR in a good place. However, the really simple power here is responding to your searchers question or pain point with highly relevant ads and landing page experience. Use your keywords in your headline and copy, and concisely focus your ad copy on your searcher’s intent. Carry this through to the landing page, again, make sure the search term is visible in the headings and copy, and keep the copy focused on solving the problem or answering the question.

For example:

Keyword: [Sustainable Dog Food]

Pain point: I want to feed my dog with a clear sustainability conscience 

Ad copy: Include the keyword in the headline, and use other related terms such as ‘ethically sourced’ or ‘environmentally friendly’ which will resonate with the user’s pain point.

Landing page: Again, we’d advise keeping the search term visible and directly addressing the issue of sustainability in the copy. The more persuasively you can touch on the pain point, the higher the chance you have of encouraging them to take action. In this example, it would help to validate how you address the pain point with statistics and/or results. Once the user is satisfied that their initial search motivation has been addressed, moving through the price, quality and delivery decisions should be more straight-forward.

Ad Rank

Ad Rank is where your ad is placed on the page. It’s not a score that you can see, but it is calculated using the following formula:

Max CPC bid  x  Quality Score  =  Ad Rank

This means that the ads which feature highest on a page are not necessarily those who bid the highest. Keeping an eye on your Quality Score and working to keep pushing it up will ensure that you get better value from your ad spend.

To conclude

• Keep an eye on your Quality Score

• Keep your ads optimised so they’re working at a consistently good CTR

• Keep your ad and landing page copy relevant to the keyword

The magic of Google Ads is that you are accessing an audience with intent. They don’t come across your ad by accident or chance, they are specifically searching to learn or take action. Listen to the search term and provide the answer. Google will reward you.