Why quality score affects your PPC campaign
When running a Google Ads PPC campaign, the Quality Score is a rating of how relevant the keywords and ads are to search terms. It helps to determine how much advertisers pay per click and whether or not the ad is put in the auction. It can be affected by different factors and affects your campaigns in different ways.
How is Quality Score determined?
When a user searches for a term or specific keyword an automatic private auction is held to decide which ads are displayed at the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Based on previous auctions and insights, search engines can measure how relevant a keyword has been.
When enough data has been gathered they assign keywords with a score between 1-10 (10 being the highest).
In an individual account it is used to guide advertisers on keywords that will perform well in their campaigns.
How is it calculated?
Search engines use machine learning algorithms to monitor how users interact with and search in the results pages. Data is then used to enable predictions about how future interactions may occur for the same or similar terms resulting in a ranking score.
Why does it affect my campaigns?
Quality score will ultimately determine which ads are eligible to enter an auction and affect whether they are displayed for a certain term. It mainly affects three areas for an ad: if the ad can enter the auction, how the ad is ranked in the auction and what the actual CPC the advertiser will pay.
If an advertiser’s ad is written and targeted on a keyword which has a high-quality score the ad is then able to be entered into more auctions. Whereas a keyword which has a low-quality score results in very few chances to be entered into auctions, if at all.
Once the ad is in the auction it is then ranked compared to the competition. This ad ranking is determined by the max CPC (how much the advertiser is willing to pay per click), the quality score of the ad and factors that may increase the relevancy e.g. extensions.
Therefore campaigns that have ads with low quality scores are more likely to find that their ads are not being shown in auctions resulting in very few impressions and difficulty resulting in conversions.
How can I improve my quality score?
There are three ways in which you can increase the quality score of your Google ads:
- Increase the relevance of your ads – this can be achieved by making sure that you have enough ad groups to break down different themes. By adding more ad groups you make each ad very highly targeted and relevant to a certain term.
- Landing page experience – when the user clicks on your ad is the site loading quickly? Is it responsive?
- Expected CTR (click-through rate) – this is how likely your ad is to be triggered for a search term that is the same as one of your selected keywords. If you make your ads very relevant to keywords that are very specific, you should have a high expected CTR.
The main positive is that you can often win bids from competitors with a higher quality score than them opposed to budget. This approach makes Ad campaigns very popular as budget isn’t the main deciding factor.
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If you’re unsure of how to increase your quality score or would like some more information on starting or having a PPC campaign managed by us, then please don’t hesitate to contact our team for your no-obligation chat.