Why you Should have a Good Quality Score for Google Advertising

Google is all about good quality – especially content. For example, from the point of view of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), the search engine will penalise you if it finds duplicate content on your website. It thus makes a lot of sense that, in their advertising terms and conditions, Google would emphasise ‘quality score’.

This dictionary meaning of this term will be very familiar to everyone however, what does this mean in the context of Google AdWords?

What is a quality score in terms of Google PPC?

The quality score that Google assigns to your PPC ads is determined by how relevant your keywords and advertisements are. The higher your quality score, the more people see your ads as your advertisements will rank higher. This is because a high quality score shows the search engine that your ads will be extremely relevant to a searcher making a search that contains those particular keywords. In addition, the higher your quality score is, the less you will end up spending on your AdWords bill.

What determines your quality score?

The quality score that Google assigns you is determined by:

• Your click-through rate (CTR),
• How relevant each of your keywords is to its particular ad group,
• What the quality of the landing page is and how relevant it is to the ad,
• How relevant the ad text is to your website, in addition to
• How your AdWords account has performed historically.

What effect does a good quality score have?

As having a good quality score lowers the cost of your campaign, a good quality score ends up increasing the return on investment (ROI) for your particular ad campaign.

The formula for calculating ROI is:

ROI = (Current Value of Investment – Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment

To use Google AdWords as an example, to calculate the ROI of a particular campaign you would take how much money the leads that you’ve generated from a particular campaign have earned you. From this number, you would subtract how much you’ve invested in the digital marketing campaign. You divide the figure that you come out with by what you’ve spend on the campaign.

5 best practices to increase your quality score

Increasing your quality score will up the likelihood that you will be successful with Google AdWords. There are five very important ways that you can make this digital marketing goal happen:

1. Keep up-to-date with your keyword research

Because the relevance of keywords, to your landing pages and adverts, plays a significant role in determining whether or not you have a low or high quality score, make sure that you’re always on the look-out for new keywords that audiences are using to navigate to your site. Include long-tail keywords into your search parameters.

2. Keep your keywords organised

It’s a great thing to have as many keywords as possible but make sure that you organise these into groups that you can easily associate with a particular digital marketing campaign. This will make planning a whole lot easier.

3. Do A/B testing

Adopt a scientific approach when it comes to putting together ad text. Don’t just write a bit of ad copy and hope for the best. Write two pieces of ad copy and test them against each other. Take the one which performs the best and see how you can best optimise this.

4. Optimise your landing pages

Be sure to optimise the landing pages that you use for each of your advertisements. If you can, see the journey that people take through your page by using tools such as heatmapping and make improvements to their experience.

5. Do away with keywords that don’t work for you

Ensure that you always perform keyword research and ascertain which keywords work for your business. Remove keywords from the campaign that don’t work for you so that you are not wasting advertising costs.

Advertising on Google AdWords is a great option to generate increased traffic to your website. To make the most of this you need to ensure that your quality score is high.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

The Digital School of Marketing’s Paid Advertising and Web Analytics Course will teach you everything that you need to know about the world of Google PPC. To learn about our other online digital marketing courses, please visit our website.