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. Quality Score is measured on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest, and therefore indicates how relevant your keyword is. In addition, the Quality Score helps determine your price per click - and the higher the Quality Score, the lower the price you pay per click.
Quality Score also affects your ranking on Google's site, as Google checks all keyword bids as well as the Quality Score of competing ads and ranks accordingly. There are therefore many good reasons to ensure that your Quality Score is as high as possible.
What is included in the Quality Score?
Three factors are included in the Quality Score:
- Expected Click-Through Rate - the likelihood that your ad will be clicked on 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 is ranked according to 'above average', 'means' and 'below average'. This will help you see where there is room for improvement.
What is in the recipe for the "secret" calculation?
It has always been a bit of a mystery how much each of the three factors weighs in relation to the Quality Score. However, there has been a thesis that Expected Click-Through Rate and Landing Page Experience has almost twice the impact on your Quality Score. This has now been confirmed by Search Engine Land, which has produced an analysis of more than 15,000 Google Ads showing that Expected Click-Through Rate and Landing Page Experience' provides a much greater return in terms of your Quality Score than Ad Relevance give.
From the table below, created by Search Engine Land, you can see that Expected Click-Through Rate and Landing Page Experience' have almost twice as high values compared to 'Ad Relevance'.
If you want to read more about the calculation, click here.
However, it is 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 get anything out of improving this factor further.
How to improve Quality Score
Since you will mainly spend your efforts on improving Expected Click-Through Rate' and Landing Page Experiencehere are two pieces of advice:
- For optimization of 'Expected Click-Through Rate': Delete unnecessary and irrelevant keywords and review your match types to make sure you only appear on relevant keywords.
- For optimisation of the 'Landing Page Experience': Focus on improving the mobile-friendliness of your site as well as the load speed.
