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If you are an active AdWords user, you might have run into a metric called quality score. And especially if you are just getting started in search engine advertising, that metric may seem as obvious as it is confusing. On the one hand, its meaning seems clear: it’s an evaluation of your AdWords quality. But quality of what, exactly? How does Google calculate the metric, what does it do to your search campaigns, and how can you improve it?In a comprehensive blog post, The PPC experts at WordStream have attempted to answer just that question. If you’re wondering what your quality score means for your website, here is a summary that might be helpful for you.
What is Quality Score?
Ranging on a scale between 1 and 10, your quality score holds the promise its name makes: it seeks to give you a quick overview of the quality of your individual ads. According to Google, three factors determine your quality score:
Expected Click-Through Rate: If your ad is likely to lead to a high rate of click-throughs, your quality score will improve.
Ad Relevance. The more closely related the keyword for which you rank is related to the text of your ad, the better.
Landing Page Experience: For a high quality score, the content on your landing page needs to match both your ad and your keyword.
In other words, a high quality score means that Google determines your ad to be useful for someone searching for a keyword on which you bid.
What Impact Does Quality Score Have on Your PPC Campaigns?
For Google, a high quality score means much more than just an estimate of how well you’re setting up your search ads. As WordStream outlines, this metric is directly related with both your cost per conversion and click-through rate.
In the interest of user experience, Google prioritizes ads with a higher quality score, simultaneously elevating their ranking and decreasing the bid required to achieve that ranking. In other words, success in raising your score will result in cheaper and more successful search advertising.
What Does That Mean For Your Website?
Of course, the impact of quality score goes far beyond individual PPC ads. In fact, as Google’s definition above hints at, your landing pages (and website as a whole) will also be affected.
For starters, your site will see more visitors as a result of higher scores and more successful search advertising. But to even get to that point, you also need to design your website and write your landing pages with your search ads in mind.
Landing page relevance and experience is a core determining factor of quality score. The more consistent the experience for your users, the better. That means your pages should be coded and written with the same keywords in mind that you use for your search ads.
Even the language and sentence structure should be similar. Thanks to the introduction and prioritization of quality score, Google has ensured that you cannot build your website and PPC campaigns as separate entities. Instead, they need to be looked at as two separate but similarly significant aspects of your audience’s digital marketing experience.
How Can You Improve Your Quality Score?
With a basic understanding of the importance of this metric for both your PPC campaigns and your website, improving your quality score is common sense. A number of factors will play into the process:
- Keyword Research & Organization
- Strategic Ad Copy Development
- Landing Page Optimization
- Utilization of Negative Keywords
Only an equal and consistent emphasis on all of these variables can reliably and consistently improve your quality score. For help in any of them, and to set up search engine advertising campaigns designed to bring relevant visitors to your website at a reasonable cost, contact us.
Terry’s cauldron of knowledge in the digital world is the result of a background in advertising, graphic design, web and multimedia development… 25 years in this business.