The Ultimate Guide to Google Ads Quality Score
Enhance your Google Ads Quality Score to lower costs, improve ad visibility, and drive more meaningful engagement with your audience.
Samuel Edwards1 min read
If you’ve done any kind of advertising through a Google Ads account, then you are already familiar with the Quality Score related to individual keywords.
That’s old news.
Did you know there is a lot more that goes on with Quality Scores in Google Ads if you do a little digging?
By understanding the intricacies of Google Quality Score, you’ll be able to improve how your Google Ads campaigns run, ensure your ads perform better, and see positive results in the ad auction.
But why should you care about Quality Scores? Here’s why:
The Importance of Quality Score
Imagine you went into a library (remember libraries?) and asked for a book recommendation and the librarian just kind of gestured around and said, “any book.”
It would be frustrating and pointless and you’d probably never ask that librarian for recommendations ever again. No one could blame you.
We like things tailored to be relevant to our specific needs and interests. Similarly, Google Ads prefers ads that are relevant to its users’ search queries. How do they know which ads are relevant? Through ad relevance, expected CTR, and landing page experience, which together form the quality score in Google.
From your perspective as the advertiser, Quality Score matters because it is one of the two determining factors in determining ad rank during the ad auction.
A higher Quality Score means a higher ad rank and better results. Especially if you’re on a limited budget, increasing your Quality Score can mean optimized returns on ad spend and how often your ad appears. You’ll be able to beat out competitors with lower Quality Scores even if they have a higher CPC bid.
A good Quality Score allows you to save money while improving visibility — a win-win. Who doesn’t like beating out competitors and saving money at the same time?
On the flip side, a low-Quality page Score can end up being detrimental to your Google Ads account. It means lower ad rank which comes with less traffic and inferior return on investment.
If that doesn’t convince you of the importance of Quality Score, who knows what will.
Different Kinds of Quality Score
So now let’s break down the many different kinds of Quality Score in Google Ads so you what’s what.
You didn’t think it would be simple, did you?
Keyword-Level Quality Score
This is the standard Quality Score. Scored from 1-10, worst to best, it’s a measure of the performance of searches that are exact matches for your keyword and reflects keyword quality scores individually.
The historic performance of a keyword will be the base of a keyword’s current Quality Score until it has crossed the impression threshold and achieved a significant number of impressions (thousands). At that point, its performance within your Google Ads campaigns specifically will then be key.
Within your quality score column, you can view Quality Score, expected CTR, landing page experience score, and ad relevance as well as historic versions of all these metrics. Use them as a guide to gauge the success of your campaign.
Don’t like what you see?
Make sure your keywords aren’t too specific. Consider loosening restrictive match types, restructuring into tightly themed ad groups, or adding negative keywords. Boost bids or budgets to increase your impression share. The numbers should help you decide what the right move is to start seeing better results.
Ad Group Quality Score
An ad campaign always ends up being a complicated balancing act of many different plates. Sometimes one is going to have to require more attention than the rest but you want to be able to determine which one so you can act accordingly. Don’t want any plates smashing on the floor now do we?
Ad group Quality Score can help direct you to the areas that need attention and improvement in your campaign.
It’s easy to let a low keyword QS pull your eye but if it’s in an ad group with a high average and you have another ad group with a much lower, is it really the best use of your time to focus on that one keyword QS?
It’s up to you but something to think about.
However, consistently poor ad relevance across an ad group can indicate weak ad copy, poor targeting, or a mismatch between keywords and messaging.
Account-Level Quality Score
Just like it sounds, the account-level Quality Score covers the historical performance of every keyword and ad in a given Google Ads account.
The factors that will bring this QS down are many low quality score keywords, poor ad quality, and low expected CTR that have performed poorly. Each additional keyword you introduce will also start at a lower Quality Score, compounding the problem.
Older accounts will fare better in account-level Quality Score and as such, it may take months for efforts to improve QS to take effect. Stick with it and the results will come.
Ad-Level Quality Score
Google evaluates expected CTR to predict how likely users are to click your ads. Click-through rate is key to determining the ad-level Quality Score for ads in each of your ad groups.
An abundance of low CTR in your ad groups will lead to low Quality Scores, weak ad quality, and poor ad relevance since Google will consider each ad in your score calculation.
If you want to boost this quality score, you can include Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) in your Search Network campaigns. This can improve ad copy and the click-through rate by making search ads look more relevant to users’ searches.
It shows the exact search in the ad (if within the ad character limits) making it a potentially useful tool. Still, watch out for ads with high CTR but low conversion that could be hurting your ROI.
Landing Page Quality Score
The landing page. It’s like the foyer of your website. The first impression you make on viewers will very likely determine how the remainder of the interaction proceeds.
So make sure you aren’t putting ugly wallpaper in your foyer, okay?
A quality landing page is important to Google because it shows a website is useful and easy to navigate, just like users want. It should be important to you, too, because a great landing page experience can be a key way to transform viewers into customers.
The landing pages Quality Score will tell you if there’s a problem with your landing page and you should take that seriously. It’s not openly available, but you can find it by hovering over the speech bubble for a keyword’s QS. A strong landing page experience score improves Quality Score and conversion potential.
Real people will be evaluating your landing pages multiple times so think of what you would score well if you were them and try to include those things.
Display Network Quality Score
The Display Network Quality Score isn’t the same as those on the Search Network.
Your Display Network QS is tied to the bidding option you chose. A campaign utilizing the CPM model will have a QS based on landing page quality. A CPC bidding-based campaign will have a QS that factors in landing page quality but also the historical CTR of the ad. Depending on whether you use CPM or CPC bidding, Google evaluates landing page experience, historical CTR, and overall ad quality. Testing placements, creatives, and formats is essential to ensure ads perform effectively.
That’s all to say that some trial and error is the right move here.
You can improve your CTR by experimenting with image ads and responsive ads and their placement. Once you find the right ads on the right sites, your score and your success will improve.
For easier management, separate your Display Network campaigns from your Search Management campaigns.
Mobile Quality Score
Google says that mobile Quality Score is calculated the same way as any device platform. One minor difference, though, is that the distance between the business and the user is taken into consideration, when possible.
Again, separation can be helpful. Separating Google Ads campaigns that targets all devices into mobile and desktop campaigns may increase your Quality Score and ad relevance. If nothing else, it might give you some greater insight into each Quality Score.
And that’s all the different types of Quality Scores. A breeze, right?
Quality Score Misconceptions to Avoid
There’s a lot to know about Quality Scores but somehow there’s just as much that you shouldn’t know or believe, anyway. Don’t get caught up in any of the following misconceptions about Quality Score:
Higher Positions Improve Quality Score
You would think this is true but Google will adjust according to differences in ad position.
Since Google doesn’t want a self-reinforcing cycle where ads with high positions naturally have a higher click-through rate and thus get a higher Quality Score and rank higher and so on and so on, their formula breaks this up. Google normalizes for position to prevent ads with the same Quality Score from benefiting unfairly.
Search and Quality Score Interact
This was mentioned earlier but these Quality scores are independent of each other. One decreasing won’t pull the other down and likewise, one increasing won’t pull up the other.
The criteria are different and the networks are, too. Focus on each of them separately based on the factors that control them. It’ll save you some headaches.
Pausing Ads/Keywords Hurts Quality Score
Your current Quality Score doesn’t go down just because you pause ads or keywords. It doesn’t affect the QS at all because that’s based on performance.
The ads aren’t active so they’re no performance to be graded on and make the Quality Score decrease or increase. It gets paused, too.
Avoid a Low-Quality Score
Here’s a list of things you should do to avoid or improve a low-quality score
Fix broken destination URLs
Check for slow load times
Put top-performing keywords in your ads
Make sure each ad group has at least 3 extended text ads
Rewrite ads with low CTR (below 1.5%)
Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI)
Think about an account audit
Professional Help
Speaking of account audits, you may need a professional to help you will all this.
Managing Quality Score across Google Ads takes time and expertise.
If, after reading this article, you’ve decided that dealing with your Quality Score is simply too much to handle, no one could blame you.
For that very reason, there are companies full of people who spend their time handling Quality Score and other ad campaign features for you.
One of those companies (the best of them, if we do say so ourselves) is PPC.co.
Let us handle all of your Google Ads campaigns and help you achieve a good Quality Score so you can stick to what you do best: running your business and keeping your customers happy.
Get in contact with us today to get a free, comprehensive pay-per-click audit and advertising assessment.
