In our previous articles we saw the importance of quality score in Ad rank equation, together with cost per click bid (ad rank = CPC bid x quality score) this can really impact your budget on your ad campaigns. 

But what exactly is the QS, and what score do you want to aim for? Let’s dig a little deeper into the quality score portion of your ad rank so that we can learn the ins and outs of this potentially mysterious and proprietary grade that Google assigns your ads.

Quality score is a metric that grades the performance of your ads by looking at three things:

1. Expected CTR
2. Ad Relevance
3. Landing page experience

The score is between 1-10. The greater the score you get, the lower the cost for your ad will be.  This is the part that is tricky, because this isn’t a number you can necessarily arrive at mathematically. It’s not a logical number that you could compute without Google. It’s not something that we truly have internal access to… but we do have some hints that we can work with.

Now let’s see each of the components to better understand this metric.

Expected click through rate: how likely is it for your ad to be clicked. Of course, since this is a prevision, you need to have history data for your account, so old campaigns performance are very helpful in this case. If you have a good history for the ad, it may work in your favor when Google aims to grade your ad’s quality score.

Ad Relevance: measures how closely related is your keyword to your ad. For a better customer experience, it is always best to include your keyword in the ad copy. The more closely your ad copy matches the keywords typed into Google by the user, the higher this particular aspect of your quality score is graded. For more details on improving keyword relevance in ads, visit the Guide to Keyword Research for SEO.

Landing page experience: are you driving traffic to the right product page, or just to the home page? Is the client able to find what they initially searched in the landing page on which they arrive? Make sure the landing page is relevant to the ad every single time. Google is capable of looking through the copy on the landing page of your ad just as they are able to look through your ad copy. If the copy on your landing page is not congruent, this will decrease our quality score. 

Now that you know more about the Quality Score, you are most likely eager to check it out in your campaigns. To do that, you must go to the Keywords report in your Google Ads dashboard and add the column Quality Score, if this is not already part of your tables. From there you can start digging into how you can improve your performance. 

Just remember, this quality score is not meant to trip you up or make your life harder, it is simply a system that Google designed to make sure that when a potential customer clicks on an ad, they are more likely to find what they are looking for on the other side of it. When everyone and their mother can advertise on Google, it’s important that they take necessary precautions to create some sort of quality benchmark so that their search engine and ad platform can maintain trust with it’s users. They’re looking out for themselves, and us at the same time!