Google Ads rewards you for marketing effectiveness, or more accurately, maintaining the integrity of their search engine. This is a pretty genius concept if you think about it from Google’s point of view – incentivising advertisers to maintain the integrity of their search engine yet still make money from advertising. Brilliant.

The metric they use is called Quality Score (QS) and it estimates the quality of your ads, keywords and landing pages to a user’s search query. It’s graded on a 1 to 10 ranking scale, with 10 being the best. As your quality score improves, your average rank tends to go up and/or your average cost-per-click (CPC) tends to go down. So how can you improve your score? To improve your QS, there are three key areas to focus on – ad relevance, expected click-through-rate (CTR) and landing page experience.

ACCOUNT STRUCTURE

Simple in theory but tough in reality! The basic premise here is the need to break your account down so that your campaigns contain tightly themed ad groups – with only a few keywords in them so that you can write ad copy which is relevant to those phrases/words. The more relevant ad copy, the better the CTR and ultimately the better the QS. So, try not to get too excited and pop in too many keywords. I recommend using an excel spreadsheet before setting up your campaign in Google Ads. It’s a little time consuming but it helps you see the relevance between your keywords and ad copy.

AD COPY & AD EXTENSIONS

Once you’ve got a clean account structure, building the wording for your ad copy should be pretty straightforward. Google reviews ad copy based on how relevant it is to the exact search a user makes. That’s why it’s essential to have the exact keyword within the context of the ad at least once. To stand-out from other advertisers and hopefully increase your click-through-rate, highlight your unique selling proposition, the benefit to the potential customer and a clear call to action which tells a user what to do e.g. click here, call today or buy now. Include ad extensions to give your ad more prominence on the search result page providing users more options to easily click through to your website. Then, test, test, test. Try different copy, and calls to action to drive the best possible click-through-rate.

LANDING PAGE QUALITY

The landing page experience needs to have a clear connection to the search query, be targeted and user-friendly. There is nothing more frustrating than opening a page and not being able to find what you want. Furthermore, it must explain what your business is about and include your contact information and privacy policy. Avoid pop-ups and try to increase load speed where possible. I would recommend split testing a couple of landing pages when building new campaigns to gauge the strongest information and layout. Just be aware more often than not, you may be surprised by which page performs better.

If you focus on the above three areas you should see an improvement in QS over time and as a direct result you should see higher ad positions and click-through-rates and lower campaign costs. Definitely worth the effort. Good luck!