Google Ads Quality Score – A guide

23 November 2022 | | Marketing, Pay Per Click

Running a successful Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign requires a fair bit of work and constant optimisation in order to improve performance. One of the main things we work on as part of a client’s on-going PPC management, is to improve campaign and keyword quality score.

What is Quality Score I hear you ask? Why is it so important?

What is Quality Score?

Quality Score is a variable used by Google in order to rank the Ads that are triggered to show by a searched for keyword.  To determine the order in which ads are listed, each ad has the following formula run against it: the Keyword bid x Quality Score = Ad Rank. Ads are then ranked in descending order based on the result of that equation.

How Quality Score Works: The Nuts & Bolts

In a nutshell, Quality Score is a Google-devised system that measures advertising quality (or relevancy), which in turn helps determine if your ad is eligible to be displayed in the search results for a given query. Beyond that, if your ad is deemed relevant, the position of your ad and the cost you pay each time it’s clicked are also partially determined by your Quality Score. The factors that determine Quality Score, as outlined by Google, include:

  • The historical click-through rate (CTR) of your account and your specific keywords.
  • The relevance of the keywords you’re bidding on to each other and to the ads you create.
  • The relevance of destination URLs that you’re sending customers to (in relation to your keywords and ad copy).
  • User-experience metrics such as page loading time

According to Google, a high-quality ad is one that:

  • Is relevant to the search query
  • Accurately describes the product
  • Is relevant to an organised landing page

Google evaluates these and other factors on an ongoing basis and assigns a Quality Score — a numerical value from 1 to 10 — for each of the keywords that you are targeting in Google Ads. The more relevant your ad, the higher your Quality Score.

The importance of Quality Score

Quality Score affects virtually all the important metrics of a PPC campaign, including

  • Impressions
  • Ad position
  • Cost-per-click (CPC)

How Quality Score Affects Impressions

Each time a user conducts a search, the Google Ad algorithm conducts an internal ad auction to determine which advertisers have ads it deems eligible (relevant enough) to appear along side the user’s search results. Quality Score partly determines if a keyword is relevant enough, and hence eligible to enter an ad auction. The more times an advertiser’s ads are deemed eligible to enter the auction, the more impressions (and hence, the more exposure) they will receive. Previously, eligibility to enter the ad auction was determined by a minimum bid that was assigned to each keyword. The minimum bid was the inverse of Quality Score — the higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower the minimum bid, and vice versa. An advertiser’s keyword would be considered eligible provided the maximum bid was higher than the minimum bid. Recently this concept was revised and Google introduced a new metric called minimum first-page bid estimate, which is an estimation of the bid amount required for an ad to show on the first page of search results if a search query exactly matches your keyword. The estimate is based on the Quality Score and current advertiser competition for that keyword.

How Quality Score Affects Ad Rank

To determine ad rank (or ad position), Google simply multiplies your maximum CPC bid by your Quality Score. It’s obvious that a high Quality Score can significantly affect the positioning of your ad. Thus, it’s entirely possible for an advertiser with a lower bid and higher Quality Score to have a higher ad rank than an advertiser with a higher bid and lower Quality Score.

How Quality Score Affects Ad Price (Cost-Per-Click)

Quality Score determines how much you pay per click through this formula: (Ad rank to beat/Quality Score) + £0.01 = Actual CPC. It becomes obvious when looking at this formula how much of a role Quality Score plays in determining your costs per click. This also means that by pursuing an effective strategy to raise your Quality Score, you may find yourself paying less per click than your maximum CPC bid.

Quality Score obviously has an enormous impact on the performance of a PPC campaign, so improving it is an important part of the ongoing PPC work we do for our clients.

If you would like anymore information on the PPC service we offer – please visit https://dental-design.marketing/services/pay-per-click/ 

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