Why Is Quality Score Important?
If we could all just bid whatever we liked on anything we liked then at the top of every Google search there would probably be a bunch of terrible ads for "easy tricks to reduce your belly fat". Potentially useful if you're actually looking for ways to streamline your physique - but just annoying if you were searching for the contact details for your bank.
This is where Google is ahead of the game. If Google was filled with irrelevant, dodgy ads for pyramid schemes and snake oil, then we would all suffer. Google wants people to actually use their service, searchers want a good experience when they search and advertisers only want to advertise to people who will actually click and then buy what they want to sell.
So this is where quality score comes in. Quality score is a potent mixture of ad relevance, expected CTR and landing page experience which helps Google to decide your Ad Rank (where your ad sits on the search results page). Ad rank has a pretty simple formula:
This all comes together to mean that a high quality score will boost your ad rank for a lower cost and a low quality score means that you will have to bid more to get your ad into the position you want.
Quality score isn't as simple as all that though - the price you pay depends on performance of individual keywords in the account, your ads, ad extensions, the account overall, your bid adjustments for location and time of day, and performance on different devices.
Keyword Quality Score
Keyword level QS is based on the exact match performance of each keyword, and until there is enough data for Google to give a keyword a quality score, its score will be based on the performance of similar keywords in your account, the account level quality score, and industry averages. If a keyword has poor past performance, you can't just delete it and start again - the performance data for that keyword will stay associated with your account forever.
Ad Quality Score
Keyword level QS is a metric which everyone can see in their accounts, so it is fairly easy to see what is doing well and what isn't. Ad level quality score, however, is much more mysterious. If you take a look into an account which has been running for a while however, you will be able to see evidence of ad level quality scores. If you take a look at historic data for your ads, you will see different average CPCs to reach the same average position in the same ad group:
Here you can see that the ad with the lower CTR has a higher average cost per click. Again, it is in Google's best interest to give a boost to ads that are highly relevant to what people are searching for. Yet another reason to make sure you're testing at least three different ads in every ad group and continually reviewing your ad copy to get the best possible CTRs!
Account Quality Score
The good thing about keyword level and ad copy level performance is that if something has been performing badly for a long time, it isn't too difficult to delete it and try a new approach. Account level quality score is a whole other kettle of fish. Account level quality score takes into account the past CTR of keywords, ads, ad extensions, different locations, devices and more. It is based on the accounts entire history and so if an account has been in a bad state for a while, it can take a long time to build up enough good history to get the account into a good shape again.
This means that when you are launching a new account, it's important to start from the beginning with a well-structured account, great keyword lists and a good mixture of well written ad copy, and put in as much budget as you can to get your ads into the top positions for at least long enough to build up some good CTRs. If you start with very low bids and your ads are languishing at the bottom of the side bar, your clickthrough rate will suffer and costs will further increase. If you start off with higher bids on the right keywords and good quality ads in banner positions, the increased click volume at launch is an investment which will be rewarded with a better quality score, and higher ad rank for a lower cost later on. AdWords does take your average ad positions into account when calculating your quality score, but I have never felt comfortable trusting the algorithm to calculate this weighting accurately every time, and top-position ads will naturally give you the most data to start optimising your account with from the outset.
If budget is an issue for you, take a staggered approach to launching your account. Launch ad groups one at a time (starting with brand, or those you expect to perform best), building up some CTR history for your keywords with high bids and then bringing the bids down when you have seen a reasonable volume of traffic.
Google's recently released white paper which stated that account structure makes no difference to your quality score may be technically true, but the point of a great account structure ultimately is that every keyword needs to be highly relevant to its ads, and relevance is one of the most important parts of quality score.
Ad Extension Quality Score
Another way to boost your account level quality score is to make use of every kind of ad extension that would be relevant to you. When calculating ad rank, Google takes into account the impact and prominence of your ads and extensions on the search results page, so it's worth including as many of these as you can. Ad extensions are proven to increase your clickthrough rates, and it's easy to see why. As well as increasing the amount of space you take up on the page, Google is also continuously optimising the sitelinks which are showing, so that you only see the sitelinks which result in the most clicks.
Location Quality Score
Location is another factor which comes into play for account level quality score. To optimise for this, make sure you are using location extensions if relevant to your business, and make location bid adjustments according to performance in different areas. This is another case of common sense. If you run a shop in Cornwall, then you will likely get more clicks from customers who recognise your brand in the Cornwall area and conversion rate is likely to be higher here too. This means that you should have higher bids in this location. A great way to make location-based bid adjustments is to look at the Geographic Location Report, where you can add and exclude locations and make bid adjustments based on location data at every granularity.
Device Quality Score
As with location-based quality score the key here is to make sure you're making use of bid multipliers and mobile sitelinks and call extensions (if relevant to your business).
If you see terrible performance on mobile due to a non-mobile optimised site, then it is better to switch mobile off until you can fix the site. Trying to run on mobile when the performance is terrible will only damage your quality score for mobile, and will mean that when you do make improvements to your site, it will take longer to see good results.
Landing Pages
If you're running AdWords for your own website, or if you have a receptive client who is happy for you to make suggestions about the website then it is always worth making some changes to any landing pages which aren't performing as well as you'd hope. This is particularly true for those running display campaigns on a CPM basis, as quality score will be entirely based on the landing page quality.
Think about your site from the perspective of a searcher - pick some keywords from your campaigns and follow the user journey. If you'd clicked on that ad, is this the page you would expect to see?
Sometimes you might not even need to make any changes to the actual site - with ad copy split testing and GA metrics, you can easily test which landing pages have the lowest bounce rates and the highest time on site. Check your customer behaviour in Google Analytics - if 90% of users jump straight from the landing page to a particular shopping page, then maybe you should test using that shopping page as a landing page in order to take searchers straight to what they want.
Final Words
The take away message from Google's white paper is that you should not use quality score as the ultimate goal for your account. If you're optimising your account properly, then a good quality score will follow. I would completely agree with that. All of the optimisation techniques which I have discussed in this blog are things which you ought to be doing anyway. Quality Score is a useful way of talking about which parts of an account need improvement, and it's a great way to see which keywords are performing badly, but fixing quality score is just common sense when you know what it means.