What Is A Quality Score?
What is a Quality Score?
A quality score is a relevancy metric determined by Google that shows how well your campaign is structured for each keyword phrases and dictates how much you will pay per click and where it is positioned by Google in the paid listings. A quality score can often be the difference maker in competitive industries.
How It Works:
You quality score is a value of 0 – 10. This score takes many different elements into consideration.
- Keywords: The keywords that are chosen in the ad group settings determine the baseline for the ads and the landing page. The keywords are important to your ad campaign for many different reasons, but in regards to a quality score it is the key element that Google uses as a baseline for your quality score. These keywords that you have chosen need to be properly incorporated into the ad copy and the corresponding landing page.
- Negative Keywords: Your negative keywords helps keep the quality of traffic and refines your ad campaign search queries. Use the negative keywords list to refine your keywords and increase the quality score. A very broad campaign often can lead to lower quality scores if not done properly.
- Ad Copy: The ad copy must incorporate the keyword phrases. This shows Google that the keyword phrases that were chosen are the phrases that you intend to use to promote the service or product. When the ads do not use the keyword phrases Google sees that the ads are not relevant to the keyword phrases you chose and therefore the quality of the campaign is lower.
- Landing Page: The landing page is the page on your website that the user will visit when they click your ad. This landing page plays a crucial part of the quality score. Not only does the landing page need to be structured in a way that is optimized for conversions and lead generation (see our infographic on landing page optimization), it needs to incorporate the keywords from your list and your ad copy. If the landing page is not relevant to the ad and keywords, your quality score will drop and you will pay more per click.
- Click Through Rate The click through rate is the number of times your ad is served over the number of clicks. This indicates to Google that the ad is relevant or not to the keyword phrase that the user entered. Google wants to serve quality ads so that people continue to use Google and they can generate more ad revenue.
- Ad Rank: Google allows you to pay the minimum amount to obtain a position. The amount that the advertising pays is based on the maximum cost per click and your quality score. The higher Ad Rank, the better positioning you will have. If you have a high quality score, you can pay very little CPC and have high positioning. If you have a low quality score, you have to pay a lot to have high positioning.
Ad Formulas
- Ad Rank = CPC Bid X Quality Score
- CPC = Ad Rank / Quality Score
Benefits Of a High Quality Score
There are many different benefits of having a high quality score, the obvious being that your cost per click will go down, which means that you will get more traffic at lower cost. One goal every ad campaign should have is to maximize the budget of your campaign, so if you are getting 1,000 clicks for you $1,500 ad budget compared to 800 clicks for that same $1,500 budget you are seeing more benefits and hopefully more conversions with the higher volume of traffic. With a high quality score, the website will also have higher ad positions. This will increase your click through rate and be more prominent in the paid listings. The ads can also have prominent site links and product extensions if the ad campaign is well trusted and has a high quality score.
How Do I get A High Quality Score
As mentioned above, the ad campaign needs to be structured in a way that is going to be focused on a keyword set. The keyword set, ad copy and landing page need to incorporate the same keyword phrases and have the same tone and language as the ads.
In summary, if the campaign is structured properly you can gain a major advantage over your competition and provide more traffic and revenue for the business. To learn more about paid search management and more details regarding advertising online, visit our paid search management page.
