What is Quality Score?
Quality Score affects how profitable and effective your Google Ads ad is, as it is Google's assessment of the quality and relevance of your keywords in relation to your ad. The Quality Score is measured on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest, indicating how relevant your keyword is. The Quality Score also helps determine your cost per click - the higher the Quality Score, the lower the cost per click.
Quality Score also has an impact on your ranking on Google's page, as Google checks all keyword bids and Quality Score for competing ads and ranks based on this. There are therefore many good reasons to make sure your Quality Score is as high as possible.
What is included in the Quality Score?
There are three factors included in the Quality Score:
- Expected Click-Through Rate - The likelihood of your ad being clicked when it is displayed.
- Ad relevance - How relevant your ad is to what people searched for.
- Landing page experience - How relevant your landing page is to those who click on your ad.
Each of these three factors are ranked by 'above average', 'medium' and 'below average'. This way you can more easily see where there is room for improvement.
What is included in the recipe for the "secret" calculation?
It has always been a bit of a mystery how much weight each of the three factors has in relation to Quality Score. However, there has been a thesis that Expected Click-Through Rate and Landing Page Experience has almost double the impact on your Quality Score. This has now been confirmed by Search Engine Land, which has conducted an analysis of more than 15,000 Google Ads ads, showing that Expected Click-Through Rate and Landing Page Experience' provides a much higher return on your Quality Score than Ad Relevance Gives.
From the table below, created by Search Engine Land, you can see that Expected Click-Through Rate and Landing Page Experience' has almost twice as high values compared to Ad Relevance.
If you would like to read more about the calculation, click here.
However, it's important to remember that if you have an above average score on Expected Click-Through Rate, Landing page experience or Ad relevance', you won't gain anything by improving this factor further.
How to improve Quality Score
Since you should primarily focus your efforts on improving Expected Click-Through Rate' and Landing Page Experiencehere are two pieces of advice:
- For optimizing the Expected Click-Through Rate: Delete unnecessary and irrelevant keywords and review your match types to make sure you only appear for relevant keywords.
- For optimizing the Landing Page Experience: Focus on improving the mobile-friendliness of your site and load speed.
