When trying to run an effective paid search campaign in Google AdWords one of the most important factors one can judge is the quality of their ads. One might ask, “How am I supposed to measure quality? Quality seems much too broad and undefined to put a numeric score on it, let alone use that to form a consistent strategy for my campaigns.”

These are valid points, however Google being Google, they have a fluid term such as “quality” down to an exact science. Continue reading to learn what Quality Score is, why it is important to digital advertisers and how you can use it to properly manage and measure your campaigns on paid search.

Welcome to Quality Score 101.

What is Quality Score?

Put simply, Quality Score is the score that Google will give to measure the quality of your ads, keywords and landing pages. It is represented as a numeric score between 1 and 10, 1 being the lowest quality, 10 being the highest. The Quality Score you see in your account is the average value calculated over a sample of your ads.

There are five components that go into calculating your exact score:

1. Expected Click Through Rate (CTR) - How likely the ad is to be clicked
2. Keyword relevance - How closely keywordswith the adgroup match the campaign topic
3. Ad Relevance - How closely the ad matches the intent of the search
4. Landing Page Experience - How transparant and easy to navigate the langing page attached to that ad is
5. History of the AdWords account - How well it performed in the past

Why is Quality Score important?

It should go without saying that the largest benefit of Quality Score is that it gives you an opportunity to measure the quality of your ads. But why is it important to do this?

The most direct benefit a high Quality Score can have is increasing your ROI. Optimizing and improving your Quality Score will most likely lead a lower Cost per Conversion. Wordstream shows there is a direct correlation between Quality Score and Cost per Conversion, the higher your Quality Score, the lower you will pay for a conversion.

Credit Wordstream

Quality Score is also important because it is a clear indicator of whether or not your keywords are performing well for a certain set of ads. If your keywords are seeing a low Quality Score, that means your ads are not matching the search intent as well as possible and you may want to consider changing those keywords.

How to Use Quality Score to Improve Your Campaigns

Before we dive into how you can use Quality Score, let’s make sure we understand what does and doesn’t matter when it comes to ad quality.

What does matter:

• User's device
• User's intention
• Performance on related keywords

What doesn't matter:

• How you structure your account
• Running your ads in another network
• Ad placement on a page

When implementing Quality Score into your digital marketing strategy, it is important to remember that improving the actual Quality Score number should not be your primary goal. Instead, focus on long-term performance and how that aligns with what your Quality Score is and what you would like it to be. Using Quality Score to A-B Test and verify what works and what doesn’t is  a great way to use the metric. To summarize, focus on long term improvement rather than tricks to increase your score in the short term.

In Google AdWords, Quality Score will also give you an insight into average expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience for ads with similar keywords in that time frame. It also tells you if your ads compare better or worse than the average in Google AdWords.

Google will show your ad compares to other ads in the Google network with similar keywords in the same time frame.

Putting a focus on these 3 aspects is ultimately what will drive more quality traffic and conversions to your site. Researching new keywords, better organizing your existing keywords, refining your ad text, optimizing landing pages and adding negative keywords are all great ways to see meaningful improvement to your quality score.