Are you endeavoring to master PPC? Then you need to enrich your knowledge on Quality Score that can have a great influence over the effectiveness and cost of paid search campaigns. Google Quality Score is the deciding factor of cost per click and effectiveness of PPC ads.Here are quick tips to increase quality score in adwords.

What is quality score?

Quality Score can be defined as Google’s rating on the relevance and quality of your PPC ads and keywords. The score usually ranges from 1 to 10, with 10 being great and 1 being poor. This value is used to determine the cost per click as well as ad rank.

Quality score depends on following factors:

• Click through rate
• Landing page and relevance
• Relevance of ad text
• Relevance of keyword to ad group
• Historical adword account performance

Why should you improve quality score?

Quality score is directly associated with the success of your PPC ad campaign. When you optimize your quality scores, you can enjoy great return on investment. Moreover, higher the quality scores lower the cost per conversion. You must remember that cost per click is different from cost per conversion. While cost per click is how much you pay for every click, the cost per conversion is how much you pay if someone makes a purchase or signup for your service. When you have good quality scores, Google lowers both cost per click and cost per conversion. A high quality score indicates that your PPC ads meet the needs of your potential customers. When you meet your prospect’s needs, then Google will charge you less for the ad click.

Types of quality scores:

• Account level quality score
• Ad group quality score
• Keyword level quality score
• Ad-level quality score
• Display network quality score
• Mobile quality score
• Landing page quality score

Account Level Quality Score:

Account Level quality score is determined by overall historical performance of ads and keywords in an account. When you have low quality score keywords, low relevance and low CTR, you may have low Account level quality score. With low score, your new keywords and ad groups with struggle to gain high quality score.

To improve:

• Delete all poorly performing ad campaigns and create new ones from scratch.
• Start new campaigns and conduct new keyword research
• Try to avoid using same keywords that you have used in old campaigns. If you are about to use the same keywords, then you need to review the relevance of landing page and other factors to improve quality score.
• Review the performance of ad campaign regularly and make necessary adjustments.

Keyword level quality score:

This is the official type of quality score promoted by Google to the advertisers to help them improving their ad campaign. You can see this score when you sign-in to AdWords.

To Improve:

• Add broad match keywords
• Begin with Ad groups and keywords with highest CTR
• Also use Broad match modified keywords
• Try to boost your impression share by increasing bids to rank higher

Ad Group Quality Score:

In order to increase your Account quality score and achieve better return on investment, you need to take Ad Group quality score into consideration. This score can be easily figured out using average score of all keywords.

To improve:

• Make certain tightly themed ad groups (use one keyword per ad group)
• Split out keywords especially if they have different CTRs, as keyword with lower CTR will affect the overall quality score
• Consider using bid adjustments for mobile devices to gain more control over quality score and ad group performance on mobile devices.

Ad Level quality score:

Ads play a vital role in determining CTR. If you have low CTR ads in the ad group, then they may have negative effect on the quality score.

To improve:

• Delete ads that has CTR of less than 1.5% and start from scratch
• Fine tune your account structure to have tightly grouped keyword themes for every ad group.
• Mention the keyword in ad headline and use different variations of keywords in ad body.
• Consider using Dynamic keyword insertion.

Landing page quality score:

The performance and relevance of your landing page contributes to landing page quality score, which in turn has a huge influence on overall Quality Score. Besides contributing to Quality Score, having good landing pages generally improve your conversion rate.

To Improve:

• Determine which keyword landing pages need to be optimized
• Increase loading speed of the landing page
• Having unique content on PPC landing page
• Landing page content must explain what your business/service/product is about.
• Landing page must be relevant to keyword and ad copy.
• Make sure that your landing page contains contact information and privacy policy of your business.
• Avoid pop-ups and excessive ads running on landing page.

Display Network Quality Score:

Display network quality score is determined with slight differences in search network quality score. If your display campaign makes use of CPM bidding, then the Quality score is determined based on landing page quality score. In case of CPC bidding, historical CTR of ad and landing page quality is taken into consideration for determining quality score.

To Improve:

• Try out different ad creative
• Test different ad types on different websites
• Try several targeting methods
• Always separate display campaigns and search network
• Review relative CTR and lost impression share
• Use negative keywords in display campaigns

Mobile device quality score:

Mobile device quality score is calculated in the same way as that of desktop quality score. The best thing is that the performance of ad campaign on desktop as well as on mobile device will not have any impact on other’s overall quality score.

To Improve:

• As location performance is important on mobile devices, pay close attention to location data
• Use location exclusions and location bid adjustments to optimize ad performance for your location.

Google Adwords Quality Score can be a complex topic. Improving Quality Score can be a tedious process and takes long time to have some effects. If you have any questions on improving quality score, please get in touch with us at Verve Innovation!