Are you using your Google ads to its best use? Have you been feeling like you have invested a lot in google ads but haven’t seen any conversion rate on your landing page? Well, there could be a number of reasons for it. Maybe you are not using relevant keywords. How’s your PPC campaign? Maybe you have been focusing on negative keywords? There are other aspects to getting a good quality score on your AdWords campaign. You need to focus on your ad position and google ads quality score to make sure that your investment meets your expected click-through rate. 

If all this information seems new to you, don’t worry. We are here to give you a comprehensive guide on how to improve your quality score on google ads. 

What Is Google Ads Quality Score? 

Google ads quality score is the ranking of your keyword in Google’s algorithm. The score ranges from 1 to 10. It basically indicates how revealing your keywords are and how much value Google puts on it. If you have a higher google ads quality score, that means you have relevant keywords. Your quality score factor has a lot to do with your visitor’s landing page experience. 

Google ads quality score reflects on your landing page, google ad and your keywords altogether. 

Let’s go deeper into what google ads quality scores are made up of. We will break it down for you. 

As we said, your landing page, google ads, ad extensions, and the relevancy of your keyword gives you a higher quality score. A higher quality score means that you will pay less per click. A low-quality score means that you will pay more per click. Note that we have written “click” and not “conversion.” 

This might sound a bit confusing to you at first, but what isn’t. As you understand what is google ads quality score, you will understand ad relevance, quality score optimization, and you can increase your clickthrough rate. 

Why Are Quality Score In Google Ads Important? 

A high ad position is required for your brand to make a powerful impact on your target audience and for your company to expand and reach more people. 

When your google ads quality score improves, your cost per click lowers. When your cost per click lowers, your cost per conversion also gets lowered. This, in turn, means that you will be earning and saving more money. If you are an independent business owner, you have to be smart about your financial decisions. And, optimizing your google ad quality score is one effective way of increasing your profits. 

Most importantly, improving your google ads quality score can lead to lowering your CPA, which stands for cost per acquisition. 

Manage your AdWords account and improve your ad rank, which will help your business save money and find organic traffic. 

Analyze Your Quality Score Breakdown

Google Ads provides its customers with three ways that they can break down their quality score. The three ways are Ad Relevance, Expected CTR, and Landing Page Experience. When you see these categories separately, you can understand where you are lacking and focus on improving those factors. 

There are other factors that go into affecting your google ads quality score as well. Here’s a broader list of factors that affects your score one way or the other. 

1. Your Google Ads CTR, which stands for current and expected. 
2. Your website’s display URL.  
3. The relevance of your google ad to the search term. 
4. Your website’s landing page quality also matters. 
5. Your google ads performance in particular geographies, from states to cities. 
6. How well is your google ads performing with particular electronic devices? 

To summarise, the major points you need to remember is that expected CTR, ad relevance, landing page relevance equals your google ads quality score. 

Now that we are clear on which aspects comprise and affect your google ads campaign, let’s go through some issues surrounding quality scores. 

We will list below some of the facts, conspiracies, and myths surrounding google ads quality scores. Yes, there are many theories on what increases or lowers your score and how they do it. Unfortunately, like many things on the internet, some of the theories are just myths. Search engine algorithms change all the time, and so, ways of doing things always get updated. We will tell you the latest tried and tested facts that will help you with a high Adwords quality score. 

Here Are The Facts

As everyone is aware, causation and correlation are not the same things. Likewise, there are several factors that are correlated to google ads quality score and others that cause the fluctuation in a website’s ranking. We have listed down factors that cause or affect your google quality score. 

CTR AKA Click-Through Rate

Your click-through rate is one of the main factors that can get you a high-quality score. Even Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist said in a statement that it comprises about 60 percent of Google Ads Quality scores. 

Click-through rate can also be translated to clicks divided per impressions. When you successfully improve your click-through rate, Google’s algorithm will automatically bump up your quality score.

Remember that CTR is highly subjective. They are made up of various keywords. And, each keyword, their historical quality score, its current competitor matters. The key is to stay active and relevant. As we mentioned before, the relevancy of a keyword changes all the time, so you not only need to know how you are performing, but who are outperforming you as well. 

If your keyword has a 10 percent CTR, it’s quality score might be 4/10. And if your keyword has 2 percent CTR, chances are, it will have an 8/10 quality score. 

Keyword To Ad Ratio

Although CTR and their effect on quality scores have been common knowledge ever since people started paying attention to google ads accounts, keyword to ad ratio is fairly new. However, it is the second most important factor that contributes to a high AdWord score. 

Every single keyword ad group matters. The thing you need to remember about this factor is that the higher the number of keywords (however relevant you think those are to your google ads), the greater the chances of diluting your ad. You might think that a higher quantity of keywords matter. But let us tell you, it’s the precision and quality of keywords that matter the most. 

If the message between your keyword and your google ad is diluted, then it means that your click-through rates will be lower than your expected CTR. This, in turn, will lead you to get lower google ads quality score. 

What you need to do is restructure all the ad groups that have keywords with low-quality scores. The best option to restructure is not to delete any keywords but pause them. When you pause certain keywords, their calculated quality scores still remain in the software’s history. So, rather than deleting them completely, you will have saved whatever benefits they brought in. Furthermore, when you add other groups for keywords, Google won’t see them as duplicates. 

It would be good to remind you again that different ads groups have a differing click through rates. So, don’t forget to analyze them first. One solution to this persistent issue is to use Dynamic Keyword Insertion. 

What’s The Ratio Between Your Keyword And Your Search Term?

The ratio between a keyword and its search term has often been compared to icebergs. When you look at an iceberg, the top portion above the sea might be huge, but it is nowhere near in comparison to what’s below the surface. 

Similarly, one keyword can contain fifty different search terms. That’s why you need to be extremely careful to use exact match keywords and search terms. When you focus on broad matches, match modifiers, and phrase match, you will notice that the ratio between the keyword (which is visible and above the surface) and the search term (which is hidden but connected, and under the surface) is far from equal. 

The discrepancy will vary from keyword to keyword depending on their match type. Focus on tightening this ratio to increase your CTR and your google ads quality score. 

Quick Bounces

Quick bounces refer to the landing page experience of your website visitor. For instance, imagine that a visitor clicked on your website only to leave it immediately, it will reflect poorly on your website and lead to a low-quality score. But what if that visitor comes back again and tries to reload your page? Well, things might seem like they have improved, but that’s not always the case. 

Time spent by a visitor on your website and bounce rates is two metrical factors that you can find in Google Ads Analytics. We recommend that you don’t waste too much time on these two aspects. However, if you know how to analyze them properly, you can figure out which keywords are irrelevant. If you have a low google ads quality score, it might be because you are using the wrong keywords. 

If you think that exit popups can improve a visitor’s landing page experience, you cannot be more wrong. They are just short term reliefs, and mostly indicate a much deeper problem of a broken website or a landing page. 

Landing Page Experience 

Although this factor is subjective for each visitor, an overall analysis can help you understand your buyer persona and, in the process, improve your google ads quality score. 

Landing page experience depends upon your landing page design, and it has gained much importance over the years. Remember that this factor depends on your individual user and their experiences, so don’t break your head over every tiny detail. 

Some of the biggest factors that you should keep in mind while improving your landing page experience to get a higher google ads quality score as:

1. Where do you get your content from? Is it an original work or did your copy the content from another competing website?
2. How do you build a trusting relationship with your website visitors? This is a major factor in improving your landing page experience. One thing you can do is provide a business address, social media handle links, and other business details in your About Us section. 
3. Did you put extra thought and effort into making your website easy to navigate? Your ad quality score and conversion rate depends on these tiny user-friendly details. 
4. Check if Google bot can crawl your text on your landing page easily. 

Your landing page is the virtual face of your brand, make sure that visitors have a pleasant experience. 

What’s The Load Time Of Your Landing Page?

This is another factor that is related to your user’s landing page experience. If a website doesn’t load fast, it’s natural that a visitor will turn on to another website. The internet has no shortage of sources. And if you want to make your website popular, you need to focus on the needs of your customers. 

In the digital industry, the standard rule is that if your landing page takes more than three seconds to load, people will switch to another website. It’s that fast. And, this will further lower your Google Ads quality score. Note that a landing page’s load time will vary from region to region.

You can visit Google’s PageSpeed Insights to further check how your URLs are doing. 

Use Long-Tail Keywords For A Higher Google Ads Quality Score

Short-tail keywords are to be absolutely avoided. They bring in lower click-through rates and get you a lower quality score. 

Let us give you an example of how these short-tail keywords harm your brand. For instance, let’s assume that you have bid on the keyword “desk”, which is a short-tail keyword.

Remember what we told you about keywords to search term ratio? Apply that theory here, and you will understand why we want you to be specific. 

In the case of the short-tail keyword “desk”, it will have various related search terms. You might be using this particular keyword for a product that is an actual desk, but the search terms related to this keyword can range from “desk calendar”, “desk lamp”, “desktop”, “desk fan”, “desk chairs”, “front desk”, etc. 

That is why we ask you to be specific and use long-tail keywords. You might think that it will narrow your target audience, that may be true, but the audience that will click on your link will bring in a high conversion rate. 

Remember that your landing page and ad copy needs to match your ad group as well. 

Match Types Don’t Affect Your Google Ads Quality Score

This might seem a little confusing, so let us explain. Your match type is indicative of how your keywords are doing with regards to their search terms. And, their effect only works at the keyword level. 

Remember that having an old Google Ads account doesn’t mean that you will have a high google ad quality score. This was a believed thing back in the early 2000s and people even bought old AdWords accounts. 

Now, all experts agree that quality performance is what matters and what drives your rank, keyword quality score, as well as google ad quality score. Maintain your high-quality performance, and you will notice that your rank will go up. Another point to drive this theory is that when you erase your poor-performing keywords, your quality score history does not change. Furthermore, it is categorized along with your competitors when google logs your performance. 

Display URL Past CTR

Unlike your website’s root domains together display URL does play a huge part in your google ad quality score.

Google logs your display URL along with your root domain have their personal click performance and historical impression. However, remember that a display URL doesn’t equate to an automatic increase in quality score. But, they can affect your click-through rate. 

How Does Your Google Ads Perform On Different Electronic Devices? 

As mentioned earlier, depending on how your ads perform on a desktop, tablet, or mobile phone, your google ads quality score can fluctuate. 

Your performance and quality score will vary based on what operating system or smartphone brand they are using.  

Keyword History

This refers to the click-through rates a particular keyword has in Google’s record. You can enter their logs too if you outperform previous keyword history. 

If you are new in advertising, you naturally won’t have a history. Google will then take a particular keyword (that you are using) and its history of performance into account. 

Experts are as of yet unclear on what happens when you bid on a keyword that is brand new and has no history. 

But, when you use a keyword (which is new to you but has a history) in your Google Ads account, Google will look through the history of that keyword and your previous CTR and its performance. 

Now, when we talk about quality scores at the keyword level, historical performance does matter when you are new. After you get enough performance data and impressions, you can rely on your own data. 

Some great ways to boost your impressions are:

1. Don’t restrict your pool where you want to show your ads. Instead, use broad match keywords. 
2. If you want to add broad match keywords, start focusing on broad themes. 
3. You should always examine your Impression Share Data. This will tell you the total percentage of your ad’s impact. 

Expected Click-Through Rate

The expected click-through rate refers to your website’s potential for scoring a high rank. 

This factor generally comes in when you don’t have enough history of your own. Once you have enough conversions, your history will be taken on its own account by Google rather than your expected click-through rate. 

How Do You Perform In Different Regions?

Similar to how your Google Ads perform differently on different electronic devices, your ads’ performance differs from region to region as well. 

You cannot yet analyze this in your  Google Ads account, but you can analyze them by categorically dividing different regions and the difference in your ad performance. 

Remember that experiments like this are never simple. There will be other factors involved. There just might be higher bids or more of your competitors in one region compared to another. 

When And What Day Do You Perform The Best?

This is another tiny detail that you can use to your advantage and improve your google ads quality score. The time and days that your ads get more engagement will be affected by various factors. It also heavily depends on your niche. 

You can analyze this by dividing and making specific ads group campaigns and fixing them for different days and hour range. Then, check if your cost per click and quality score improves or deteriorates. 

Here Are The Myths

Google ads quality score has been a part of a lot of debates and many theories have cropped up on how one can improve their quality score in google ads. As we have mentioned several facts, we will also bust some myths surrounding this hot digital topic. So, let’s dive in!

Ad Extensions Impact Your Google Ads Quality Score Directly

This is one of the most popular misconceptions about quality scores. They are, in fact, related to Quality Scores and the ad rank equation. However, they do not cause the quality scores to fluctuate directly. 

This misconception might have begun because ad extensions can help in increasing your google ad’s real estate space. Which, in turn, can technically lead to more click-through rates and a higher quality score. However, as stated earlier, they do not directly affect your quality score. 

Pausing Hurts

You wouldn’t really find that pausing any ad groups, Google Ads, or simple campaigns would actually have any direct impact on your Google ads quality score. Of course, you may lose the momentum on certain campaigns, but you pausing something wouldn’t mess with the related data or your Quality Score. Everything will stay as it is. 

Only One Quality Score

If you are simply browsing over your Google ads quality score, you will notice that you are only able to view the Quality scores at the keyword level. This will be kept inside the account for Google Ads. But if you use hidden scripts for Google Ads, you will be able to uncover an overall Google ads quality score. Exercise caution nonetheless. A quality score is never a key indicator of performance. On the other hand, conversion rates, and cost per conversion are. Interestingly, there will be times when you come across a mutual conversion goal and Quality score. But a high Google Ads quality score doesn’t necessarily mean that you will be making more money. 

Display & Search Competition

You might not believe it, but you will find a completely hidden Google Ads quality score for display campaigns for networks. Just one catch- you can’t see it. Interestingly, that hasn’t really stopped people from believing that the display performance actually affects the Google Ads Quality Scores on any search network. But, it doesn’t work that way. There have been no conclusive reports that claim that display performances can affect Quality scores in any form. Just like what you see on a search network, the display performance is heavily reliant on metrics that are attuned to your targets. 

Negative Keywords

Just like the belief that ad extensions have any sort of effect on Google Ads quality scores (which is a myth), if you choose to add or remove any keyword that you find negative- nothing is going to change your quality score. On the other hand, if you do decide to add a negative keyword, you might just improve the click-through-rates that you receive. And this will help in the improvement of your quality score over time. 

Keywords on Landing Pages

You can put in as many keywords as you deem fit, but it won’t affect your quality score. In fact, you can try stuffing it in your landing page, and you still wouldn’t find any difference whatsoever.

Covering Up Dead Bodies

On the flip side, if you start deleting keywords that are low quality- you still wouldn’t be able to impact your Quality scores. Sure, it might make your text much cleaner, but it won’t have any real effect on the quality score at a keyword level. In fact, the only thing that you would be doing by reducing low-quality keywords is to make your account more manageable. Remember, you may have some keywords that have low-quality scores, but the decent cost per conversions. In this particular scenario, it would rather be useful for you to not sacrifice KPI for something as mediocre as that. 

Bidding High To Maintain

There is a possibility that you believe that a higher bidding average might lead to a better quality score. Rest assured, you wouldn’t really improve your Google Ads quality score much if you artificially increase your bidding average and then bring it back down after everything is said and done. The quality score might just remain the same. Remember, in an auction, your competitors are based on the CTR and are placed exactly for the same ad position. But this also means that you shouldn’t be worried about your quality score if you are thinking about lowering your bids. If your ad copy remains the same, the Google Ads quality score wouldn’t be affected. 

Account Structure Doesn’t Matter

It definitely matters. Yet, it doesn’t directly impact the quality score. Rather, it helps in influencing other factors that help develop the quality score- like click-through rates. This is similar to the Iceberg Effect, where the care and focus you invest in ensuring that your keyword and search term have a ratio of 1:1 would actually see off a good click-through rate. And this will automatically register a better Quality Score. 

Conversion Rates

Considering conversions are mostly subjective and have no prerequisite location for its creation, Google doesn’t put much value on it. This also means that the quality score too doesn’t give any importance to the conversion rate- thereby remaining impervious. If it was actually the case, Quality scores would be manipulated to an extent rendering it useless. 

Keyword Insertion Always Works

This is a brilliant feature that can be used automatically to insert keywords into one’s ad copy, thereby saving effort and time. Since it gives one a relevancy bump, there have been reports of many individuals believing that it directly impacts the Quality score. They tend to disregard the fact that this feature might first enhance the CTR, and then that would improve the Quality score. Also, one has to remember that the DKI is useful in adding keywords, and not search terms. So, if your search term to keyword ratio is somewhere around 1:30, your CTR wouldn’t improve as much as it would have if the ratio was somewhere near 1:10.

The Conspiracies to Increase Google Ad Quality Scores

If you think people living in deserts, and in RVs are the only ones prone to conspiracy theories, you would be extremely surprised. There are more living in the city of New York waiting for the next invasion on Independence Day. But, these conspiracies haven’t been proved either way- so no point thinking if they factor anywhere when deciding the Google Ads quality score. 

At Least Two Ads

Although there isn’t any way to conclusively prove if Google would actually reward a user with a higher Google Ads quality score, simply because the user has two ads that are being tested to get high click-through-rates. But since most companies actually test two ads out together whilst having some results to back up their claims, it can get quite surprising to see when someone puts up two ads with assumptions. 

Exact Match, All The Way

This is not entirely true, but not entirely false either. The claim is that the Google Ad Quality score for any ad that you upload gets considerably high when you match with exact keywords. But by now, you must have learned that Quality scores aren’t really affected by match types- for the keyword could be something small, or long. In any case, the click-through rate would probably be extremely wild too. Yet, negating it completely will be stupid, for if you match the keyword to your search ratio- things get different. When the ratio is lowered as much as possible, the CTR gets improved- and that indirectly helps improve Quality Scores. 

The Quick Fixes

As you have learned what is a fact, and what is fiction, it is time we dove into the biggest ways that anyone can mechanically improve their click-through-rate, and through that their Google Ads Quality Score. 

Single Keyword Ad Groups

The way is pretty simple if one were to follow it diligently-

1. Make sure that the ad group you choose only has a single keyword in it. 
2. Every keyword you use must have exact matches on three counts- phrase, exact, and a broad match modifier. 
3. You have to be sure that the keyword is exactly specific to the ad. 

If you end up following it to the end result, you will see that the ratios have increased exponentially. And this exponential raise will help increase your Google Ad Quality Score too. 

Geographic Specificity

Since you find single keyword groups of ads to be beneficial, campaigns that are extremely specific to the geography. You could improve your ads by adding city/county wording in your landing pages. If you manage to granulate the geographic area, you would be able to see their Google Ad quality scores on an individual scale. This will help you manage both your landing page message and your ads. Interestingly, this will help with a host of things- your conversion rates, CTR, and Google Ads quality score will all increase. 

Why Should Google Ad Quality Scores be The Only Thing On Your Mind?

Quality scores can be extremely overrated. Period. 

People who focus on Quality scores aren’t knowledgeable about improving conversion rates. They believe that Quality scores are the only barrier holding them from success. Remember, there will be several instances where your Quality Score will be low due to the keyword, but your CPL and conversion rate will be extremely high. The quality score is just a metric at the end of the day and has no bearing on how much money you are making. Try getting to know the conversion rate optimization- then you will probably stop clamoring over Google Ads Quality Score. And this will lead to you actually focusing on increasing your conversion rates, and lifetime values. 

When Can Google Ads Quality Scores Actually Be Important?

Google is a user-friendly search engine, everyone knows that. Considering that almost 5 billion people use this search engine regularly, it makes sense for them to ensure that users get the best information available. They have to take drastic steps to ensure that the sites displayed are top-notch. Google Ad Quality Scores are expressly useful for Google’s values are displayed on ads, landing pages, and keywords through the Quality scores. They help Google maintain control over the ads, and ensure that every single ad is following the protocol, and are worth showing to the users. 

Even if you discard Google’s eye to swivel around for customer satisfaction, a Quality score is still important as it dictates the success your brand is achieving. Google’s statistics are mostly used to determine how relevant your ad is and how consumers are rating it. 

Most importantly, a Google Ads Quality score will tell you if your ad is actually going to feature in a Google search. This means that if your ad is not good, it might remain completely invisible to users. Also, Quality Scores affect the ranks of your ad. Considering your ads are paid, you will be assigned ranks. And the higher your ranks are, the better chances you have of being visible to users. 

3 Tips That Will Help You Improve Your Quality Score on Google Ads

While you can wish that quality scores for Google ads improved on their own count, it would just be wishful thinking. Marketers have to be well aware of how to improve their Google Ads Quality Score. Nonetheless, here are 3 tips that might just do the trick.

1. Review Data Reports for Impression Share:

This means that you will have the software at your disposal to check how many times your ads have been viewed when contrasted with the number of times they could have been viewed. This allows one to gauge their performance, and work on rectifying the mistakes. 

2. Use Keywords that Aren’t Too Broad or Too Niche: 

You have to hit the nail on the coffin. There is no way your ad will work if your keyword is not perfect. Too broad, and you will lose it in the crowds milling with the same phrase. And if you make it too specific, you will only find a very narrow viewership that might not be beneficial for your ad’s growth. 

3. Restructure Ads for Relevancy:

You need to group your ads according to their relevance. For, Google views this ad relevant as the connection that results when a searcher’s query uses the exact search term which is provided in the keyword. 

Google Ads Quality Scores have their own place in the development of ads. You shouldn’t spend any more time on them than is necessary. For sometimes, less is more. True, they are important- but not so much that you forget about other aspects of ad strategies.