March 27th 2018

The Best Ways to Improve Your AdWords Quality Score

Since being a Google Partners Badge holder we have ran many campaigns. Like anything in marketing, you can spend money whether it be digital or on traditional means of advertising but return isn’t always guaranteed. However, there is a way to maximise the effectiveness of your AdWord campaigns by understanding the way google calculates your Ad Quality Score.

What is ‘Ad Quality Score’?

‘Ad Quality Score’ is a score assigned by google next to each key word campaign. This score can have a dramatic effect to your ads performance and is sometimes the reason why your ad might not be showing as often as your competitors or why you’re not receiving enough clicks. The idea is that Ad Quality score makes campaigns fairer to those advertisers who don’t have the most budget behind their Ads.

What is the Ad Score based on?

Ad score is based on three variables these are:

  1. Click-through rate (CTR) – How many people click through to your ad. This indicates how useful it is to users searching certain phrases.
  2. Ad relevance; meaning that your ad has to be relevant to the search query of the user and be of use
  3. Landing page – the relevance of the landing page to your ad meaning that if your ad is about a certain type of product and then the landing page (the page that the user is taken to when they click on your ad) is taking you to a different type of product then the landing page wouldn’t be relevant.

The best ways to improve your Ad Quality Score

  1. Make sure you use structured and smaller but more targeted ad groups.

By doing so you are creating a more relevant campaign which will mean the user searching for products like yours is more likely to click on the ad and you won't be using up valuable budget on empty impressions from users who aren’t likely to click on your ads. You should have groups of 5 – 20 key words ranging between broad and exact match phrases.

  1. Create targeted landing pages and increase loading speeds

Most clients don’t realise just how important the landing page is. Landing pages should be targeted which means containing content that uses targeted key words for each ad group. This increases relevancy of the landing page and increases conversions. By targeting your landing pages, you are creating happy users satisfied by usability.

We know that it is not practical to make a landing page for each ad you have but the ad that could generate you the most income should definetly be invested in. Use a web designer who specialises in functionality. You can also check your loading speed by using webmaster tools or page speed.

  1. Make sure you and your team know the Ad Score factors.

Pass on this article or put together a quality score chart where you can check your ads against all factors.

  1. Create optimised compelling Ad Copy

This way your ad copy will be tailored towards your key words which will make your ads more relevant to the users searching. You can do this yourself or Google has a tool called Dynamic Keyword Insertion which does this automatically and focuses on getting the best results for you campaign.

  1. Geographies and Budget

Make sure that the locations that your campaigns and ad groups are set to exactly where the users are that you want to target. When taking into account your geographies you need to recognise your companies target audience, their demographic and age. Are they going to live in the areas you are targeting? Could this be a reason you’re not getting click throughs? Just like traditional marketing, digital should be methodical and follow the same principles. Budget too can be a factor, if your days budget has been used up by 11am- your ads will not show for the rest of the day so sometimes when a campaign has ran for a while and your results start to halt this could be why, increasing your budget by a little may go a long way.

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