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What is a Good Quality Score? How to Improve It Quickly

A good quality score depends on what kind of keyword you are bidding on. A good quality score should be considered from 8 to 10 but of course, you can’t find it for every keyword because quality score may vary from low commercial intent to high commercial intent keywords. 7 is a good quality score for low intent keywords but for competitor keywords you should always aim for more than 3.

So whenever a new keyword is added Google automatically assigns its quality score 6. Google cannot determine your CTR if a keyword is brand new, so by the time, based on a combination of factors, including expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience, it either goes down or goes high. if the value is high it is always considered a good quality score. Moreover improving and having a good quality score is not an onetime thing. It is a constant process.

Imagine you’re driving around a dangerous mountain road when suddenly a warning light on your dashboard comes on. Paying little attention to it, you drive on towards a sharp bend.

In a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, the Quality Score is like your engine light. If you pay attention to it, it might just help you stop your campaign from falling off the edge of a cliff.

Keyword research is the core of marketing. If you could find more relevant keywords related to your niche, you could get better quality score in less efforts. When you can align the keyword targets of your ad and marketing messages with what audiences are currently entering into the search box, success is practically guaranteed.

What is Quality Score?

Quality Score is an estimation of the current quality of the keywords in your ads. This affects your ad groups, campaigns and even your whole account.

There are three factors that determine the Quality Score:

Expected clickthrough rate
Landing page experience
Ad relevance

If your ads and landing pages are more relevant to the users, you’re likely to have a higher score.

It must be noted that Quality Score is a helpful diagnostic tool, but it isn’t to be used as a key performance indicator (KPI). It’s better used as a guide for your campaign success.

Why Should We Care About?

Your ads and their triggered landing pages will be rated on a scale of 1 to 10, based on how relevant they are to people viewing them. Ideally, you want your ads to appear at either position 2 or 3 on search results pages, but the Quality Score has a significant impact on where your ad appears, and it also affects how much you are paying for cost per click advertising.

Due to this, it’s important for digital marketers to get a grasp of Quality Score, and understand the factors that affect it. In addition to the three key factors mentioned above, other measurements such as impression share and trends can come into play.

Ultimately, a lower Quality Score can cost your company more money, as you’ll have to pay more per click. Conversely, having a higher score will save you money on PPC advertising.

Unless you have the best possible score of ten, you should always be looking to improve your Quality Score so that your company can save on costs and improve the position of your ads in organic search results.

So, what can we do to improve it?

How to Improve Your Ad Quality Score

To boost Quality Score, there are a few things digital marketers can do:

Get familiar with the factors. Once you know more about the measurements that impact the score, you can leverage them to your advantage.
Reduce the load time for your landing pages on both desktop and mobile. This is an increasingly important part of online marketing. Even great content can be abandoned if pages are too slow to load.
Use smaller, more targeted ad groups in your campaigns. By focusing on specific keywords in smaller groups, you can generate better engagement with your audience.
Optimize your ad copy with relevant keywords. This will help click-through-rate (CTR) too.
Make your landing pages more targeted for each individual ad group. Including target keywords in the content is vital.

Reverse-engineering Google Ads Quality Score factors

Quality Score is an important keyword related metric to track in a pay-per-click (PPC) platform such as Google AdWords. It is rated on a scale of 1 to 10 (1=worst, 10=best). A good Quality Score has many benefits: it will lower your cost, improve your ad rank, and improve your ROI.

Quality Score is determined by following three factors:

Expected Clickthrough Rate
Ad Relevance
Landing Page Experience

Each of the above mentioned factors will have a status as follows:

Below Average
Average
Above Average

While Quality Score is calculated at the keyword level, it is possible to roll up the Quality Score to ad group, campaign or account level.

A very important objective for a digital marketer is to understand the relationship between Quality Score and its factors.

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

PPCexpo has developed two charts to visualize Quality Score and its factors. In this article we will explore “Whole and Parts” chart to understand the relationship between Quality Score (i.e. the whole) and its factors (i.e. the parts).

“Whole and Parts” chart shown above has following components:

Blue line – Ad Relevance
Purple line – Expected CTR
Orange line – Landing Page Experience
The three factors of Quality Score are plotted as lines on the left y-axis, and the statuses are marked on the left y-axis
Quality Score is shown as fill (cyan color) on the right y-axis, “–” (null) and 1 to 10 range is marked on the right y-axis
Date is shown on x-axis

It is important to observe that fill and lines are used to differentiate between whole and parts.

Without any effort we can make the following observations in the “Whole and Parts” chart shown above:

In Week 03 Ad relevance (blue line) improves from “Below Average” to “Average”, which causes the Quality Score to improve from 5 to 6
In Week 05 Landing Page Experience (orange line) improves from “Average” to “Above Average”, which causes the Quality Score to improve from 6 to 7
In Week 07 Expected CTR (purple line) improves from “Average” to “Above Average”, which causes the Quality Score to improve from 7 to 9
We can extrapolate that if Ad relevance improves from “Average” to “Above Average”, the Quality Score may improve from 9 to 10

Thus, we can very easily visualize and understand the relationship between Quality Score and its factors.

Google AdWords calculates Quality Score based on three factors:

How closely our ad matches the intent behind a users search queries (Ad Relevance)
The likelihood that our ad will be clicked (Expected CTR)
How relevant, transparent and easy-to-navigate our landing page is for users (Landing Page Experience)

Visualization is an easy and efficient method to understand the relationship between Quality Score and its factors.

In this article, we will explore the “Stacked Grid Chart” visualization to perform in-depth analysis on Quality Score and its factors and understand their correlation. The visualization will allow us to view Quality Score at the keyword, ad group, campaign or account level.

Here are some observations based on the Stacked Grid chart shown above:

The sum of columns (i.e. factors) “Ad Relevance” (blue color), “Expected CTR” (purple color) and “Landing Page Experience” (orange color) is 100%. The percent contribution of each factor (i.e. each column) to Quality Score is 33.3%.

The “Overall” column (gray color) is the summation of the following three columns:

Ad Relevance
Expected CTR
Landing Page Experience

The sum of “Overall” column will be 100%

“Above Average” (green color) is the summation of the top row

“Average” (yellow color) is the summation of the middle row

“Below Average” (red color) is the summation of the bottom row

From the Stacked Grid chart shown above we can conclude the following:

34.3% of the factors are “Above Average”
26.6% of the factors are “Average”
39.1% of the factors are “Below Average

“Ad Relevance” factor has performed great with an “Above Average” score of 29.7% (out of 33.3%)

“Landing Page Experience” factor’s performance is mediocre with an “Average” score of 24.1% (out of 33.3%)

“Expected CTR” factor has performed poorly with “Below Average” score of 31.0% (out of 33.3%), also some “Landing Page Experience” factor have received “Below Average” score of 5.2%

It is clear, that the detail shown above is much more informative and actionable than a simplistic score of let’s say 5. Armed with this information a digital marketer may decide to focus on improving “Landing Page Experience” and “Expected CTR”.

Never Stop Keeping Score of Ad Quality

A pay-per-click (PPC) campaign is never ‘set and forget’. You have to constantly monitor the health of your ads, checking engagement levels, clicks and conversions. With data analytics and a solid strategy, you can adjust your campaign for better results.

Using your Quality Score as a guiding tool, you can improve your ads, keywords and landing pages over time. Done right, this can reduce your PPC advertising costs and boost organic traffic as your ads are viewed by more qualified leads.