What Is Quality Score and How Does It Affect Google Ads

Table of Content

• What Is Quality Score?
• Why Does Google Have a Quality Score?
• Why Does Quality Score Matter & How Does It Affect Google Ads?
• Wrapping Up
• Frequently Asked Questions

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You want to promote your brand and products/services on Google. You start by deciding your goals, curating the ad content, selecting your audience, etc. Then, you launch your ad campaigns on search engine ranking pages to achieve your goals. Is your PPC work finished with these steps? It is not if you are not paying attention to Quality Score.

To master Google Ads, Quality Score is a metric that marketers simply can’t ignore. It has a direct influence on the effectiveness of your campaigns in terms of cost, rankings, and more. Just as important as your credit score is when getting a loan, the quality score also plays a crucial role in the performance of your Google ad campaigns.

Although Quality Score is a simple metric, it is a big part of the PPC equation and certain factors affect this score. Well, this guide is all about Quality Score (QS) and we will be discussing its effect on Google Ads in detail below. Let’s get right into it.

What Is Quality Score?

Quality Score (QS) is a quality rating and relevance rating of your targeted keywords and Google Ads. By analyzing the data from past ad auctions, Google assigns a QS number on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best.

This score or rating helps advertisers in understanding how good or bad a job they are doing while writing ad copies, choosing keywords, and selecting the landing pages. A high score means the advertisers are performing well and a low score means they need to work more in certain areas to achieve better results.

Now, are you wondering why Google uses Quality Score? Are Google Ads not all about bidding and getting higher positions? Let’s clarify it first.

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Why Does Google Have a Quality Score?

The most straightforward answer to this question is – Google wants to display more relevant content and ads to users every time they search for something.

Yes, it is paid advertising but there are two things to consider here. Google puts the users first and that is why the most relevant results appear on the search engine results page. Second, Google gets revenue from advertising only when the user clicks on the ad. So, if a low-quality or irrelevant ad is being displayed, users are less likely to click it and Google will make less money.

That is why Google relies on Quality Score to provide ratings to targeted keywords and ads. A lower rating will motivate the advertisers to improve their ads to get better ratings, eventually resulting in a win-win situation for everyone.

Why Does Quality Score Matter & How Does It Affect Google Ads?

To put it in simple terms, Quality Score is an important factor that decides the following while running Google Ad campaigns.

• Is your ad eligible to enter the ad auction process?
• How will your ad rank on Google?
• What cost per click (CPC) will you pay?

Well, this is the whole Google advertising model, isn’t it? From entering the ad auction to paying for the clicks, Quality Score plays a role in all of it. Let us now see how your Quality Score can impact these processes mentioned above.

Eligibility to Enter Auction

As we mentioned earlier, Google doesn’t want to show irrelevant ads to the users. Even if an advertiser raises the bid for a high ad position on the page, it won’t be profitable for Google if the ad is irrelevant and won’t get clicked.

The main focus of paid search advertising is to drive users to take action. If Google finds the ad irrelevant to the search terms, a low QS is assigned to the ad. It might not even get to the auction for most searches. So, it is important to have relevant ad copies for keywords so that your ad gets high QS and is eligible to enter the auction.

Positioning/Ranking of Ads

After the eligibility criteria pass and the keywords plus ads that are likely to be relevant for a search query enter the ad auction, Google further evaluates certain things such as:

• The Quality Score of ads to see how relevant they are.
• The bidding amount of different ads to see the max cost per click (CPC).
• Other things like ad extensions that improve the click-through rate (CTR).

Each ad gets a score based on these factors and the ones with high scores get the top slots on the first search results page. Advertisers always want to get their ads in higher positions, especially on the first page, as that generates more clicks, leads, and sales.

Therefore, it is important to pay attention to Quality scores to get better ad rankings on Google.

Impact on Cost Per Click (CPC)

Finally, the Quality Score of your ads has an impact on the CPC. To maintain a certain position in the search results, advertisers need to pay CPC. But, ads with higher QS can benefit here as they will have to pay less to keep their position when compared to the next competitor in line.

To put it in more simple terms, the higher the QS of your ad is, the less you will have to pay for the same click.

Wrapping Up

After reading this, you now must be aware of what quality score is and how it can impact your Google Ad campaigns. Bidding is an important part of PPC advertising but that is not the end of the story. To cost-effectively advertise and reach the maximum audience, you need to work on your quality score by making improvements.

Make sure that your ad copies are relevant to the search query and use the perfect ad extensions that match well with your content. Next, the landing page should also be relevant and must deliver a good user experience so that your ads and keywords get better quality scores. That’s all about Quality Score, it is now time for you to focus on it!

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