Do you think that the position of a Google Ad depends only on your bid and how competitive the keyword auction is? Wrong!
Along with the bid, the quality score is equally important in determining Cost-per-Click you will end up paying. The reason behind this, is that Google is interested in providing the end-user with the most relevant content and is willing to give discounts to advertisers that provide such content. Meanwhile, giving disincentive to bad ads with higher cost per click. Therefore, quality score is important, and understanding the factors affecting quality score is the key to a successful campaign.
Let’s dive deeper into each of those factors:
- Keyword/Ad Relevance – How closely your ad is matched to your keyword. For example, If I am targeting the keyword “flower delivery manchester”, does my ad copy include this phrase? Inserting the search query text in the ad copy itself is the best way to ensure high quality points for this aspect.
2. Historical/Expected Ad Click Through Rate – If your ad has a historical high impression to click rate (CTR), your quality score will be better. Google’s aim here is to ensure that your ads ads bring value to the user on the search results page and instils enough curiosity to warrant a click. You can achieve a higher CTR by highlighting the relevant USP’s and placing call to action words, like Enquire Now. Lastly, adding negative keywords could help eliminate unnecessary ad spend and boost your CTR.
3. Landing Page Relevance – The user sees the ad with relevant text, clicks the ad and expects to see a page that gives exactly what it promised in the ad and something else. Google tracks how long user spends on the page and how many interactions are made with the website. If user leaves the page right after the click, it will result in low quality score. Furthermore, page loading speed is important. There are plenty of websites that loading speed on mobile is 6 or more seconds. Making your website loading faster will ensure better user experience and thus better quality score.
These 3 were the main components that determine your quality score which is a number from 1 to 10.
Here you can see the impact of the Quality Score on your CPC and Ad Rank.
