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What is the Google quality score?

September 16, 2015 - 2  min reading time - by Emma Labrador
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Promoting a product, a service or a brand can be done through search engine advertising. But when it comes to paid ads, there are a few things you need to know. And one of them is the Google quality score. In fact, if you are launching a PPC campaign, this score has its importance.

What is the Google quality score ?

Indeed, this quality score will have an impact on your campaign effectiveness and its cost. Google determines thanks to this score how your ad will perform and how much you will have to pay for each click. This cost per click (CPC) is multiplied by your maximum bid to know your ad rank in the ad auction steps.

The Google quality score also highlights your Google AdWords ads relevance based on the keywords and text you used, your landing page and the visitor’s search terms. The more higher your quality score is, the better your ad will be ranked at a lower cost per conversion.
This cost per conversion is not the same as cost per click. It refers to how much you pay when someone realise the action you wanted them to to.

This score is calculated from :

  • The relevance of each keywords within the ad
  • The relevance of the keywords in themselves
  • The historical click-through rate
  • You account history
  • The historial CTR of the URL displayed in the ad
  • The quality of the landing page

However, there is no indication from Google on how each components impact your ad ranking. But one thing is sure, the CTR is the most important one. Google regards your ads as relevant and offering a good UX if a lot of people who see your ad click on it.

How to increase your quality score?

As your quality score will impact your campaign performances and how much you will pay, it is important to optimize a few points to take the best out of it:

  • Work on your keywords: find relevant keywords thanks to Google Keyword Planner for example. Prefer long-tail keywords as they respond to the intents of search better.
  • Improve your text ad: you can do A/B testing to know which text is the most targeted to your audience. Your text must be compelling and attractive. An effective ads will get an higher CTR, the key the increase your quality score.
  • Focus on your landing pages: learn how to optimize your landing pages to offer the best experience possible to your visitors and create pages that connect with your ad groups.
  • Track how your ads groups are behaving to implement the right changes during your campaign.

Basically, a low quality score results from a disorder between keywords, text ads, landing pages. That’s why you should focus on structuring your PPC campaigns into well organized groups of keywords that target the right audience. It is all about relevance.

Emma Labrador See all their articles
Emma was the Head of Communication & Marketing at Oncrawl for over seven years. She contributed articles about SEO and search engine updates.
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