The Importance of Following Your Google Quality Score in PPC

Quality Scores for individual keywords in your AdWords account can help you assess how your PPC efforts are performing. But to really get to the bottom of any issues that arise you need to look at the different types of Google Quality Score and gain a greater understanding of them.

Our brief guide will introduce you to the types of quality score, why you need to understand them and common misconceptions. Learning about these things can help you raise your quality score and improve your PPC success.

Types of Google Quality Score

• Account-level: The result of historical performance of all keywords and ads in the account. Poor performance on a number of ads can bring down your total score. The time the account has been open is also a factor, so do not be tempted to start again with a new account when things aren’t going well.
• Ad group-level: Helps you assess where areas need work within a campaign. Work on the lowest average quality score areas first for a better ROI.
• Keyword-level: Visible in the AdWords interface and ranked from 1 (poor) to 10 (great). Calculated by the performance of search queries exactly matching your keyword.
• Ad-level: Determined by the click-through rate of each ad.
• Landing page: Tells you how your page performs for Google’s three key factors – transparency, navigability and relevant and original content.
• Display network: Assesses performance based on your site and similar sites, helping you understand if image or text ads are performing better.
• Mobile: Quality score for mobile devices (smartphones and tablets).

Why you need to understand Google Quality Score

Quality Score is important as it shows how relevant your adverts are to the queries users enter. For starters, it helps you understand if a keyword is even eligible to enter an auction and whether it will show for queries. And along with CPC bid it determines ad rank (ad rank = CPC bid x quality score). This means that those with small budgets can still get to the top position. Quality score also matters for keyword-targeted ads (ad rank = display network bid x quality score) and for placement-targeted ads on the Google Display Network (ad rank = bid x quality score).

Put simply, if your keyword-level quality score is too low, the keyword won’t even be able to enter the auction and your ad will not be seen.

Common Google Quality Score misconceptions

• Changing match types alters quality score
• Quality score suffers if ads or keywords are paused
• Search and display quality score affect each other
• Higher positions are more beneficial
• Deleting/restructuring low quality score elements deletes their history

Tips for boosting quality score

• Check URLs are working and lead to the correct pages
• Improve your site’s speed
• Rewrite ads with low click-through rates
• Use top-performing keywords in ads
• Consider Dynamic Keyword Insertion to boost click-through