HomeHow to Improve Your Google Ads Quality Score (and Earn More $$)

How to Improve Your Google Ads Quality Score (and Earn More $$)


What is Google Ads’ Quality Score? 

Your Google Ads Quality Score is a measure of the quality, relevance, and performance of the ads in your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns. Because Quality Score affects both:

your Google Quality Score has a major impact on your PPC success and profitability.

how does google ads work - quality score

There are a number of uncontrollable variables in paid search advertising, but luckily, you ultimately do have control over your Google Ads Quality Score and can take steps to improve it!

Proper Google Ads campaign management and organization can increase your Quality Score in several ways:

  • Better keyword data: With regular keyword research, you can build your campaigns on the right foundation, ultimately increasing the relevancy of your keywords to your ad messaging and landing pages.
  • Effective account structure: Organizing keywords into small, tightly related groups is crucial to achieve high Quality Scores. This practice makes it much easier to create specific ads and landing pages targeted to your intended audience. You can learn more in our guide to Google Ads account structure.
  • More relevant ads: Google ads that are compelling and speak to the searcher’s query increase your click-through rate (CTR), and high CTR is the fastest path to a higher Quality Score and lower costs per click.

Let’s take a closer look at how WordStream can help you achieve high Google Ads Quality Scores.

Quality Score Begins with Keywords

Your keywords are the foundation of your PPC activities—if your keyword research is weak, your entire Google Ads account will suffer.

Most search marketers depend on free, public keyword tools to build their PPC keyword lists. This can really harm your relevance—you have no way of knowing if the general, popular keywords these tools spit out are truly relevant to your business and customers.

Your own Web analytics and log files are a much better source of keyword data. These private sources tell you the actual words and phrases that real people use to find the products or services you offer. You’ll also have an accurate picture of which keywords drive the most traffic and conversions, so you can focus your PPC efforts on those areas first, without making guesses based on general global data.

Check in on your quality score with our free Google Ads Performance Grader

Grouping Keywords to Improve Quality Score

WordStream also helps you find the best way to group your keywords for an optimized Google Ads campaign structure. The key to high Quality Score ad groups is—you guessed it—relevance. All the keywords in an ad group should share a high degree of meaning.

For example, let’s look at a pet store’s keywords. It’s obviously suboptimal to lump all your keywords into one group, and try to attract customers with a generalized advertisement for pet supplies. For one thing, a keyword like “pet supplies” is bound to be very competitive (and expensive). On the other hand, you can’t create a unique ad and landing page for every single keyword in your list—you wouldn’t have time to do anything else.

The solution is to group your keywords by theme, and then segment those groups into subgroups, and so on, creating a hierarchy of small, manageable keyword groups.

Now you can write a targeted ad and landing page for each group. This makes your life easier, and it helps you increase your Quality Score.

WordStream simplifies the keyword grouping process with Quality Score tools that suggest segments based on a relevance algorithm, then do the sorting for you with the click of a button. Finding and sorting 20 closely related keywords in a database of thousands could take hours in a spreadsheet, but takes just seconds in WordStream.

Writing High-Quality Google Ads

To reiterate, your Google Ads Quality Score depends on several factors, including those related to your ad relevance score. Paramount among them:

  • The relevance of your ad to the keyword
  • The relevance of your ad to your landing page
  • The historical performance of your account
  • The click-through rate of your ad

Clearly, the quality and effectiveness of your ads is important. Likewise, you need a system for creating ads that won’t eat up all your time.

WordStream can help here too, with ad text tools that help you determine which keywords to include in your ad groups.

Using the right keywords in your ads not only improves your rankings, it catches the eyes of potential customers to increase CTR. This, in turn, further improves your Quality Score—so you continue to get more exposure at a lower cost.

Need help improving your Quality Score? Get a free, instant account audit with tips on how to increase your Quality Score and save money: Try the Google Ads Performance Grader.

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