Everything you need to know about Quality Score Methods in 2024

QS stands for Quality Score, a valuable measurement that affects your business Ads’s rank in the Google search engine. The result from Quality Score measurement shows the quality of your ads through the PPC (Pay-Per Click), CTR (Click-Through Rate), the relevancy of  keywords, and landing page. This indicator uses 1-10 as the leveling method, with 1 as the lowest score and 10 as the highest score. The way you strategize your ads can be considered as successful if the quality score is high. Meanwhile, if your ads are less relevant and useful, Google usually gives you a low quality score.

Introduction to Quality Score

Quality Score is a determining factor for your ads’s rank, we suggest you focus on improving your ads’s quality instead of optimizing the score. QS is a general indicator aiming to help you strategize a better plan for your further ads. Your target must go beyond the highest score that the QS provides. You can take insights from the QS and start a recommendation for your ads’s planning so it will generate more leads and sales in the upcoming periods.

Every marketer’s experts must have been familiar with Quality Score, but several of them fail to recognize the aspects that cannot be seen by the eyes. For one thing is to not look at the Quality Score as similar as the key performance metrics. It is not the solution for your ads improvement, instead it is a metric to guide you into the areas that require optimization. Second, there are more elements than only the keywords level in QS that you need to investigate to solve the overall issue. So it is important to note that finding the right solution to improve your ads using Google ads requires a lot of digging by your own selves, by the help of several technologies.

Google sees Quality Score as important

This indicator helps Google measure the relevancy level of your ads. Google will not agree to display your ads if it is not perceived as relevant, because Google itself competes with the other search engines worldwide. Of course Google wants to maintain its reputability through the recognition that the search engine is trustworthy and quality-assured both from the contents and advertisements distributed. The role of Quality Score in this context helps Google to notice whether your ads are relevant for searchers in certain sectors. By doing this strategy, Google is able to deliver the best possible experience to searchers.

Quality Score is important as it determines the success

You can use it to know your rank, along with your bid, so that you can build a better strategy both in content and pricing by learning from the data provided. If you get the highest rank, your ads will be located in the highest position in Google search engine.

That being said, we do not mean to say that Quality Score is not important for you. It is important, but keep remember that you need to do more research about the strategy of delivering relevant ads and offering a user-friendly experience to the audiences. You can also renew your bid in order to be competitive and achieve a number 1 position.

2. Expected Click-Through Rate

Google uses expected CTR to inform you about the rate when people search the keywords put in your ads, and click your site to answer the keywords typed. The expected CTR is usually calculated by looking from the past-CTR’s performance of ads.

3. Landing Page Experience

This metric measures the relevancy and usefulness of your landing page, once a user has clicked on your ads. The important elements to be considered in this metric are your bounce rate and site speed. If the bounce rate is high, and/or your landing page takes a long time to load, then the Quality Score you get will be low.

Ad Group Quality Score

This score is used to decide which areas that you need to put a higher effort for your campaign. The example is you have a low keyword QS in an area of advertisement, but your overall average is 7. In the other area, you get 4 of the overall average.

This information helps you get a clearer picture to where you have to focus first. You can receive a better ROI by working on the lowest average of QS.
Having known the QS of your ads group can also help you restructure your campaigns and lower the CTR to boost the overall QS of your ads group. The ads group quality score cannot be seen in one account from the tab titled “Ads Groups”, but rather it is shown through the average keyword’s QS in that specific group.

Keyword Level Quality Score

This score is calculated from the performance of search queries typed by your audiences that exactly match the keywords you put. The keyword’s QS is measured based on the historic performance from Google search engine until they achieve a significant number of impressions in your account. Significant number implies a high number, reaching the multiple of thousands.

Ad-Level Quality Score

The ads you promote through your Google ads account have a different click-through rate, that leads to the different QS too. If you have a lot of low CTR ads in the average score of the group, your total QS will be considered as low since Google Ads considers all of your ads when calculating your scores. You can improve your CTR by putting DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion) for your Search Network campaigns. DKI ads will show you the user’s exact search query within the ad, but still you need to be careful in doing this method because if you do DKI a lot, the parts of ads where you put the DKI will receive more clicks than the non DKI ads.

Landing Page Quality Score

The quality of your landing page is measured from these three elements: Relevancy, content’s originality, transparency and navigability. Your landing page affects your QS because as a search engine, Google wants to provide its users with high-quality websites that fulfill the user’s problem. Talking about landing pages, it actually not only affects Google but also your business, especially the marketers. A good landing page helps an advertiser turn visitors into customers and improve ROI.

Display Network Quality Score

The method of this score is Google Ads will consider your ad’s historical performance on the site you are eligible for. This score’s type is affected by different  factors. If the campaign uses a CPM model, QS is measured based on the quality of your landing page, whereas the CPC method uses historical CTR and landing page quality as the measurement. Another way to improve your Display Network Quality Score is to look at your relative click-through rate. Evaluating this metric will help you understand how your ads are performing against others on the same websites.

Mobile Quality Score

In this part, the QS is calculated in the same way even though the device platform that the users use might be varied from computers to smartphones. However, the system calculates the distance between the user and business location when available. Mobile devices that have complete Internet browsers and computers treat ads similarly related to the Quality Score, however, your ad has a different QS for the mobile and desktop counterparts.

Write Relevant and Compelling Ads Copy

You need to include the relevant keywords represented in the headline, description and URL link. Writing the relevant keywords in all segments of your ads copy can increase the CTR because your keywords match with the words that your audience types. It will also increase your Quality Score because Google notices the relevancy of your keywords. Although you need to create relevant keywords, keep in mind that your keywords need to be natural.

Ad Formats and Dynamic Headlines

In this method, it is important for you to create responsive search ads. It will give you a high chance to gain a maximum CTR. The dynamic headlines mean that you include the expanded text ads by doing keyword’s insertion, location insertion, and countdown.

Use Negative Keywords and Review Campaigns Regularly

Using a robust list of negative keywords helps you automatically exclude the keywords that are not relevant to your business. By excluding non-relevant keywords, your ads relevance and CTR will not be negatively impacted. One example of tool that can help you to do this is Webmechanix. It has compiled a list of more than 1,500 negative keywords that should be considered, based on your sector.

Check Out our Keywords Selection to help you on your SEO Keywords Selection.