You want your PPC campaigns to be successful and obtain a positive ROI. Whether you know it or not, the quality score can have a significant impact on the success of your campaigns and the CPC you pay. The quality score doesn’t have to be mysterious and understanding it can position your campaigns for success.
What is Quality Score?
A quality score is simply a measure that Google uses to determine how relevant a keyword is. The scores indicate what the search engine thinks a user’s overall experience will be. It looks at the quality of ads, keywords, and landing pages. Quality score rates on a scale of 1-10, one being the worst and ten being the best. The number helps marketers determine areas that may be lacking within their marketing strategy.
This score is vital to your digital marketing strategy because it is used to help determine the CPC of your ads and your ad rank. Ad rank is made up of three components.
- Max Bid – how much you are willing to pay for a click
- Quality Score – the quality of your ad keyword
- Ad Extensions – Any Ad extension information
It is important to pay attention to the quality score metric because improving it can boost your campaign and ignoring it can cost you money.
How is Quality Score calculated?
Quality score is dependent on several different factors. Search engines want to ensure that users are finding answers to their questions, so they want to ensure that ads that displayed are highly relevant and helpful. Google keeps it secret how these factors are determined and weighted, so it is crucial to optimize and understand each component.
1. Clickthrough rate (CTR)
Your ad CTR is a critical metric to google. A positive historical CTR indicates to the search engine that your ad is relevant and is what a user is looking for. A low CTR can mean that your ad is not what users are seeking.
2. The relevance of a keyword
Keywords should match the ad and user intent. If a keyword is unrelated to the ad that is triggered, it is irrelevant to users and can hurt your quality score. The more relevant your keywords are to your ad, the better.
3. Landing page experience
Your landing page is the first experience a user has when visiting your site. There are a lot of reasons a user will leave your landing page. For example, if the landing page is irrelevant to the ad, users can quickly get frustrated and leave without continuing to other pages on your site.
The same goes for landing page quality. If the information is not organized or easy to read, users will leave. If the next steps are not clearly defined, users can also leave. Make sure your landing pages direct to what the ad is about and ensure that the structure of them promotes a positive user experience.
How does Quality Score boost PPC ranking?
A good quality score can influence your overall campaign performance and the cost you pay for each click; this directly impacts your ROI.
1. Cost per conversion
Cost per conversion decreases, and the quality score increases. Google’s goal is to provide quality results to a searcher. If your quality score increases, that signals to the search engine that your ad is useful. The more useful an ad, the less you will be charged for a conversion in the long-run.
2. Increased position
Ad rank determines your position in the search results. Ad rank is made up of three factors, quality score, max bid, and the use of ad extensions. When you increase quality score but keep the other factors the same, you are increasing your overall ad rank score. This translates to a higher ad position, and a higher position can lead to more clicks and conversions.
3. Actual cost per click
Actual CPC is different than max bid. Actual CPC is the price that you pay for the click and can be lower than the max bid that you are willing to pay.
Increasing quality score can help you lower your actual CPC. By achieving a higher quality score, and therefore a higher ad rank, you only must pay to beat the competitor below you. For example, if the ad in position two is paying $1.00 for their ad, you would only need to pay $1.01 for the number one position.
How to boost Quality Score
Luckily a low-quality score is not permanent. There are ways to boost the score and get your campaigns back on track.
1. Keywords
There are a few things with keywords that you can easily do to improve your quality score.
Do keyword research. Discover new, relevant keywords that people are searching for and add them to your ads. Look for long-tail keywords that can help convert and encourage clicks.
Reorganize your ad group structure and keywords. As mentioned earlier, keyword relevance to the ad plays a significant role in your quality score. If your ad groups have unrelated keywords to the displayed ad, this can hurt you. Restructure your keywords and ensure that they are all relevant to the ad.
2. Review & update landing pages
Landing pages play a huge role in user experience. The easiest way to boost your quality score is by making sure your landing pages for each ad are relevant and guide the user to the purpose of the ad. Good landing pages make the user experience positive. Another thing you can do is update any existing landing pages. Ensure information is structured appropriately, and the question in the searcher query is easily found and answered.
3. Update ads
Your ads may not be compelling enough. Update your ad text and information and include calls to action. Make it clear that you can answer the question or provide something to the searcher. You can also test out different text in the ads and compare to see which text provides a better CTR and better results overall.
Conclusion
Quality score is a big part of digital marketing and PPC strategy. Understanding how quality score is determined and what you can do to make it better is a great first step in improving your campaigns.
Sometimes it’s good to get help from experts. WebFx can assist you in analyzing your PPC campaign and help you get the best ROI possible. Our digital marketing experts are trained in PPC and SEO and are passionate about getting you the best results. Call us today for more information!
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