Understanding Google Ads Quality Score
Quality Score is a pivotal metric within Google Ads, serving as a diagnostic tool to gauge the quality of your ads in comparison to other advertisers. It’s a reflection of the overall health and performance of your PPC campaigns.
What is Quality Score?
Quality Score is a metric that rates the quality and relevance of your ads, keywords, and landing pages on a scale from 1 to 10. A higher score indicates that your ad and landing page are deemed more pertinent and beneficial to someone searching for your keyword, relative to other advertisers.
Key Points about Quality Score:
- It’s not a key performance indicator (KPI) and shouldn’t be optimized or aggregated with other data.
- It doesn’t directly influence the ad auction but serves as a diagnostic tool to determine how ads for certain keywords impact the user experience.
How is Google Ads Quality Score Calculated?
Quality Score is derived from three primary components:
- Expected Clickthrough Rate (CTR): This measures the probability that your ad will be clicked when displayed.
- Ad Relevance: Assesses how well your ad aligns with the intent behind a user’s search query.
- Landing Page Experience: Evaluates the relevance and utility of your landing page to users who click on your ad.
Each of these components receives a rating of “Above average,” “Average,” or “Below average.” This rating is benchmarked against other advertisers who displayed ads for the same keyword in the past 90 days. If any component is rated “Average” or “Below average,” it signals a potential area for improvement.
Additional Insights:
- Quality Score is based on historical impressions for exact keyword searches. Changing keyword match types won’t affect the Quality Score.
- If you see a “—” in the Quality Score column, it indicates there’s insufficient data from exact keyword matches to determine a Quality Score.
- Other factors influencing ad quality, not necessarily captured by Quality Score, include the devices used for search, user location, time of day, and specific assets.
- Data from Google’s crawlers might be used to assess ad quality, which can influence Quality Score.
Checking Your Quality Score:
In the future Google Ads user experience (launching in 2024), you can check your Quality Score by:
- Accessing your Google Ads account and selecting the Campaigns icon.
- Navigating to the Audiences, keywords, and content dropdown.
- Clicking on Search keywords.
- In the table’s upper right corner, open the Quality Score section to view current and historical Quality Score metrics.
Conclusion:
Quality Score is a valuable metric in Google Ads, offering insights into the effectiveness and relevance of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. Regularly monitoring and understanding this score can guide optimizations, ensuring your ads resonate with your target audience and deliver optimal ROI.