Understand Quality Score and improve your Ads (or not )

Quality Score has always been considered one of the most elusive performance metrics in Google Ads. But what is Quality Score?

There are three components to the Quality Score, which is only assigned at the keyword level:

Ad Relevance: how well your ad matches the search query.

Expected Click Through Rate (ECTR): Google’s determination of how likely your ad is to be clicked, based on things like matching query intent to your ad and your historical CTR data.

Landing page experience: the usability and relevance of your landing page to the searcher.

Google takes these three factors and compiles them into a score from 1 to 10.

Marketers have two strong opinions about quality score: either it’s relevant and important to maintain, or it’s something best ignored because it doesn’t matter. We show you both stances below.

Perspective #1: Quality score doesn’t matter.

1. It is not actionable. It’s hard to monitor and improve because it’s based on Google’s algorithmic judgment. And it doesn’t clarify what in our ads or page is causing the low score.
2. It is only applicable to search. It ignores other types of campaigns such as display or video.
3. Inconsistency. Marketers have seen serious mismatches between score and performance, with accounts with high CTRs, relevant ads, impressive landing pages and yet have low quality scores, and vice versa.
4. Bot-based scores. Bots determine whether our ads are relevant and whether we deliver a satisfactory landing page experience. But they still give us results as in point 3.

Perspective #2: Quality Score still matters in 2021.

1. Its impact remains the same. It’s still an equal factor in ad ranking, and ad ranking still matters if you want to appear at the top of the SERP (or at all). This score is a very simple metric for assessing how “good” an ad is, and a really useful guide for advertisers to know how well their ads match searcher intent.
2. The bar for “quality” has been raised. Google has made it easier for advertisers to write good (or at least not bad) ads. It raises the bar for everyone else to write a really good ad with a significantly higher quality score.

In conclusion it’s totally up to you whether you decide to focus on the quality score or not. If you’re struggling to get your ads to show up in the SERPs, improving your Quality Score can help. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if your account is meeting the goals, maybe you shouldn’t pay too much attention to Quality Score.

We like to see how such different opinions can come out of one concept, and all of them equally valid. Stay tuned for more articles like this by subscribing here!