Quality Score Explained Video Transcription:
Thomas Green here from Ethical Marketing Service, today I would like to take you through the Google Ads Quality Score. How it is calculated and how you can improve it.
Quality score according to Google is a general guide for whether your ads and landing pages are useful to the searcher. It’s from 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest.
It’s made up of:
- Expected Click-Through Rate or the probability someone will actually click when the ad is shown
- Ad Relevance or how logical is it, for a searcher to see that ad, when they type that search term
- Landing Page Experience or does the landing page reflect the copy in the ad.
How you keep track of how well you are doing at these three. Is within the quality score columns and it’s either below average, average or above average.
Now that we know the basics, if you wanted to improve your quality score, how would you do it?
Let’s start with expected click-through rate. In preparation of putting this together for you. I did check what Google recommends regarding quality score and interestingly, the specific instructions around improving expected click through rate is all about what is said in the ad and nothing else. But there is of course ad relevance which is one of the other factors which make up quality score.
So estimated click through rate, is about what is said in the ad. But it’s not about how relevant the ad is.
What I interpret that to mean is. Expected click through rate is how compelling the ad is and perhaps relative to other ads in the auction.
When I thought this through. I thought it was very interesting that two thirds of what make up quality score is about ad copy.
So if you want to improve estimated click through rate, make your ads more interesting or more compelling.
Next is improving ad relevance. This is perhaps the simplest of the three, it’s simple because it’s about if you have the keyword in the ad copy. You might test having the keyword. Or keywords in multiple parts of the ad, for example the path and descriptions as well as the headline. But for the sake of clarity, ad relevance is how relevant the ad is to the keyword the ad ranks for.
If you search for the term “Ethical Marketing Service” and our ad shows. It should say “Ethical Marketing Service” in the headline of the ad.
Next is landing page experience. Your landing page should be helpful to the visitor and they should see your businesses contact information clearly. It should be easy for the visitor to navigate and have the keywords or search terms on the landing page.
Overuse of popups may have a negative impact. Page speed is another issue, as it affects the experience the visitor will have.
So now you know what makes up quality score and a few ways you can improve it. Here’s a few useful things we haven’t covered.
There are some historical columns which can be added to the google ads interface. One example is “quality score historical”. One very useful way to use this is if you set the time frame for the last 7 days at keyword level and then segment by day. You will see what the quality score was at the end of each day for each keyword. So instead of seeing what it currently is, you can see what it was for the last 7 days.
This is useful because you can see how the changes you have made in the account, have influenced quality score metrics over the timeframe you have set. If you go to the last 30 days, you may have to segment by week rather than day. But the principle is the same.
If you see a dash where the quality score is supposed to be. It’s likely it hasn’t had enough impressions yet. If it has had impressions, but still no quality score. It’s likely that the impressions weren’t for the exact match version of that keyword. That is what quality score is based on, not different variations of the keyword.
Quality score is not calculated every time an ad registers for an auction in the way that ad rank is. It’s more of an estimate over time. I have a video on ad rank if you want to know more about that.
Hopefully quality score is a bit clearer for you now. I have a team of Google Ads professionals if you wanted to do a consulting call at any point.