Google Ads is Google’s pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform that enables businesses to create ad campaigns on Google properties.

Google Ads uses a paid search advertising model, in which users bid on the keywords they want to have trigger their sponsored ads. Your ads are then displayed alongside search results on Google when someone uses one of your keywords in their search query.

The prevalence of your advertisements appearing depends on which keywords and match types you select. WordStream offers a number of free keyword tools that can assist in your PPC keyword research, as well as informative, free white papers on topics such as Google Ads match types.

While a number of factors determine a successful Google Ads campaign, much can be achieved by focusing on:

• Relevance - Crafting relevant Google Ads keyword lists, tight keyword groups, and proper ad text.
• Quality Score - Google’s rating of the quality and relevance of your keywords and PPC campaigns.

Relevance & Quality Score also play a role in the Google Display Network where AdSense technologies are used to figure out what ads to show on what pages throughout the Google display network.

WordStream’s Google Ads Performance Grader is a free Google Ads tool to help Google advertisers better understand how well their campaigns are performing compared to PPC best practices. The Google Ads Performance Grader uses a proprietary grading algorithm based on more than 60 different factors, including ad spend data, Quality Score, ranking, impressions and other variables.

Your Google Ads Performance Grader report includes an overall grade as well as individual grades in ten key areas of pay-per-click management:

• Wasted Spend - Are you making proper use of negative keywords? Or are you wasting hundreds, even thousands of dollars per month on irrelevant keywords that never convert?
• Quality Score - Are your campaigns Google-approved? High Quality Scores have a major impact on your ROI, improving your rankings and lowering your costs.
• Impression Share - How often do your ads appear as a result of relevant search queries? Increased impression share can improve exposure and multiply your lead generation results.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR) - CTR is a measure of how targeted your ads are. If your CTR is low, you may be losing ground to competing advertisers.
• Account Activity - To maintain performance, you need to spend active time in your account. How often are you checking under the hood?
• Long-Tail Keyword Optimization - Are you utilizing longer, more targeted keywords in your campaigns? If not, you’re missing opportunities to grab high-intent, low-cost traffic.
• Ad Text Optimization - Are you writing enough text ads to get strong performance in terms of impressions, clicks, CTR and ad ranking?
• Landing Page Optimization - More landing pages usually means more targeted messaging. Do you have more or fewer landing pages than similar advertisers?
• Mobile Advertising - With mobile traffic growing at 200% each year, it’s crucial to stay on top of mobile PPC best practices like call extensions, sitelinks, and mobile-optimized text ads.
• PPC Best Practices - Are you adhering to the proven best practices that PPC experts follow to ensure optimal Google Ads performance?

You’ll learn how well you’re really doing in each of these important areas, as well as how you could improve your performance, driving more leads and sales at lower costs.

In 2011, we created the Google Ads Performance Grader to help advertisers audit and analyze their Google Ads accounts. We recently passed a pretty big milestone: The Performance Grader has been used to audit Google Ads accounts representing over $3 billion in collective advertising spend. That’s an incredible amount of insight and analysis that we’ve offered to advertisers around the world, all for free. Now, we’ve taken all that rich data and used it to improve the Grader. The newly relaunched Google Ads Grader includes new features and functionality that make it even more valuable to busy marketers and small businesses. The improvements include:

• Performance Tracker: Automatically track and analyze your account every 30 days, so you can see how your overall performance and key metrics are trending over time. For example, advertisers can use Performance Tracker to easily monitor and act on changes in Quality Score, something Google just doesn’t offer.
• Mobile Readiness Score: Assess your mobile PPC preparedness and optimization, including an evaluation of your account’s adherence to mobile best practices.
• New and Improved Benchmarks: We’ve revisited our competitive benchmarks for PPC, so all of the KPIs in your performance report (including Quality Score, click-through rate, account activity, and wasted spend) are more current based on the thousands of accounts we’ve analyzed.

In addition to a full report of your current Google Ads account performance, you’ll get actionable tips on how you can improve your score. These best practices for Google Ads account management include:

• Filtering out wasteful, irrelevant clicks and non-converting traffic with negative keywords
• Maximizing relevance across your campaigns for higher Quality Scores
• Raising click-through rates with strong keyword, text ad, and ad group targeting and organization
• Practicing regular, active account management and optimization
• Expanding and refining your campaigns with long-tail keyword research
• Testing multiple text ads to optimize CTR, conversion rate and cost per conversion
• Creating unique, targeted, well-designed landing pages for each ad group
• Making use of the modified broad match option and other settings that improve targeting
• Leveraging Mobile PPC features like call extensions and sitelinks to improve conversions

Are you following these all-important best practices in your own Google advertising campaigns? Or do you only think you are?

Ask yourself these questions: 

• Do you have a sneaking suspicion that your Google Ads (AdWords) campaigns could be doing better?
• Need to justify greater investment in PPC to your management?
• Just curious if all your hard work in PPC has paid off?
• Want to show off to your coworkers what a PPC rock star you are?

Any and all of these are great reasons to use the Google Ads Performance Grader to get a free, instant report on your account and see how your PPC metrics stack up against best practices.

Need one more great reason to use the Google Ads Performance Grader? It’s an award-winning tool that was recognized in the 2012 Massachusetts Innovation & Technology (MITX) Innovation Awards for Best Customer Engagement Driver.

MITX 2012 Innovation Awards Winner

With Google conducting nearly 70% of all online searches (more than Yahoo and Bing combined), success with Google Ads can drive an enormous amount of traffic to your business.

Google Ads has revolutionized the online advertising landscape, encouraging advertisers to create relevant ads that cater to the searcher’s needs. The innovative quality requirements that make Google Ads so unique and powerful can also make it tricky for advertisers to maximize their ROI, especially as new businesses struggle to juggle the various components that make up Google Ads.

The Google Ads Performance Grader provides clarity and understanding to the difficult and confusing elements of Google Ads management. Because Google is so complex, it can often be difficult to determine where you are losing money in your campaign.

The Google Ads Performance Grader gives you a fast, free, and easy-to-understand audit of your Google Ads campaign, showing where and how to improve your PPC campaign in order to maximize profits.

The Performance Grader can be used in numerous ways:

• New to Online Marketing? Learn where to focus your efforts as you begin in Google advertising, ensuring a profitable and efficient campaign.
• Are You an Experienced AdWords Advertiser? The Google Ads Performance Grader provides a thorough and comprehensive report on your PPC campaigns, bringing your attention to where you can improve results and save money.
• Does an Agency Manage Your Google Ads Account? Use the Performance Grader as a free auditing tool to see how well your agency is working for you.
• Are You an Agency that Manages Google Ads Accounts for Clients? Use WordStream's Google Ads Performance Grader to explain and illustrate your work to clients in a format that can be easily understood.

Try out our free Google Ads Performance Grader, and let us unlock the secrets of Google Ads for you.

Looking to improve your score? We’ve recently interviewed the top scoring users of the Google Ads Performance Grader and have asked them to share their secrets and strategies, explaining how they’ve gotten their Google Ads campaigns into top-notch condition.

Marko Kvesic of Zagreb, Croatia, holds a master’s degree in traffic science, and explains that he often alters his campaign strategy depending on a client’s goals—some may be dedicated to building a solid long-term Google Ads (AdWords) campaign, while others might be more focused on an immediate increase in traffic. Marko explains that different needs require different organization.

Here are some of the key PPC techniques Marko suggests in building a successful Google advertising campaign:

• I create ad groups of related keywords with exact match only keywords, and ad groups with broad and modified broad keywords.
• I bid based on my client budget and goals (if the goal is traffic on the site I use CPC, if it is conversion I use CPA, if it is branding I use CPM bidding).
• I focus on increasing Quality Score so I pay less for the click.
• Location extension is a must.

Marko also notes the importance of continuously working to improve campaign results through testing and optimization.

His advice to struggling AdWords managers?

"My advice is always be relevant, create relevant campaigns and give the user the answer to his query as precisely as you can."

To read the full article, with Marko’s complete list of tips and in-depth recommendations, check out the full interview on our blog.

Consider the advice of Stefan van Vliet, co-owner of Dutch agency Compass Online Marketing, who completed the second interview in our second series of ongoing interviews with those who received high scores with the Google Ads Performance Grader.

In our full interview with Stefan, he explains some of the mistakes he made early on when first beginning his campaigns:

"I chose to set the budget to virtually limitless and tried to optimize our campaign while running, but just couldn’t keep up (and honestly didn’t know what I was doing). So only 1 week and almost €10k in losses later I pulled the plug. So for an extensive lesson in AdWords management: always test before you allocate serious budgets."

Stefan explains his company’s successful Google Ads strategy:

• Get sufficient data by bidding high and getting in spot #2-3 (above organic results).
• Keep track of conversionsKeep track of conversions, cost per conversion and value per conversion (using conversion tracking with dynamic value tracking).
• Adjust bidding to meet a cost per conversion which is roughly 50% of the value per conversion.
• Optimize ads and try to improve conversion rates.

When asked for his advice for low-scoring marketers, Stefan suggests to:

• Leverage negative keyword lists
• Split campaigns on a low level
• Leverage advanced CPC bidding in Google Ads Editor
• Use the comments function within Google Ads Editor to make notes of what you do

For more detailed information about Stefan’s winning techniques and suggestions, read the full interview on our blog.

Anyone with a website and credit card can do pay per click advertising on Google Ads. However, we’ve found that most advertisers are not well-informed on how to create an effective advertising campaign to drive paid clicks to real business leads. That’s why we created the Google Ads Performance Grader — a free tool that breaks down the technical aspects of PPC so you know which parts of your Google Ads account to improve.

Google’s Quality Score is a grading system that judges your ads and gives you a "score" between 1 and 10. Having a good Quality Score is essential to a successful Google Ads campaign.

Google’s quality rating has a powerful influence over the cost-effectiveness of your paid search campaigns, making it essential to have a good Quality Score in Google Ads. Having a high Quality Score is a tremendous benefit to your Google advertising campaign, as it provides you with:

• Lower costs - Google rewards advertisers with high Quality Scores by lowering their cost per click (CPC), which can subsequently lower your cost per conversion.
• More exposure - When you have high Quality Scores, your ads will display more often and in better positions. You can get more exposure, more clicks, and more conversions without having to raise your bids.

Your Quality Score is determined by several factors:

• Relevance of ad copy to the keyword
• Relevance of the ad to its corresponding landing page
• The ad’s click-through rate (CTR)
• Historical account performance
• Other relevance and performance factors

A higher Quality Score equates to more impressions at lower costs, lowering your cost per click and cost per action.

Having a high Quality Score is key, but it can often be difficult to manage the varying factors that contribute to Quality Score single handedly. WordStream offers a set of award-winning software and service solutions that are  specifically designed to improve your Google Quality Score.

As much as we’d like it to be the case, Google Ads isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it advertising platform. If you want to successfully reach the people in need of your product or service and deliver them a valuable marketing experience, you need to be proactive—and that means working hard to improve your Google Ads quality score.

So—how do you do it? In order to answer that question, we need to unpack the true meaning of Google Ads quality score. Don’t worry: Contrary to what you may believe based on all the discussion surrounding it, quality score is actually a pretty simple metric. Let’s dig into it.

Perhaps the most important thing to know about Google Ads quality score is that it’s a keyword-level metric. There’s no such thing as an account-level quality score or a campaign-level quality score. That being said, it’s totally fair game to calculate the average quality score across all the keywords in your Google Ads account. In fact, when you use our free Google Ads account evaluator, this is one of the many tasks we’ll take care of on your behalf.

OK—so we’ve established that quality score pertains to keywords. But, what does it say about your keywords? Basically, when Google Ads assigns a quality score to one of your keywords, that’s their way of telling you how relevant and helpful your ad is to the users its targeting. Because Google strives to serve the most relevant and helpful ads possible, an alternative way to think about quality score is as a measure of the likelihood that your ad will outperform the others that are targeting the same keyword. If your keyword has a quality score of 1, your chances of winning a top ad position are slim to none. If your keyword has a quality score of 10, you’re in awesome shape.

Now that we’ve covered all the fundamentals, let’s turn our attention to what you really need to know: how to improve your Google Ads quality score. From a broad perspective, improving your Google Ads quality score is all about creating ads that match the intent behind the keywords you’re targeting and help users accomplish what they need to accomplish. So, if you’re targeting high-funnel keywords that signify intent to learn rather than intent to purchase, you should create ads that teach rather than sell.

Moving from the broad to the specific, let’s look at the individual signals Google Ads uses to determine the quality scores of your keywords. Spoiler alert: They’re all sort of connected.

• Keyword relevance: You can improve your Google Ads quality score by writing ads that closely match the intent behind the keywords they’re targeting. Building tight ad groups is a great way to make this easier on yourself.
• Landing page relevance: Another straightforward way to improve your Google Ads quality score is to create landing pages that match the intent behind the keywords they’re targeting and make it easy for your prospects to do what they need to do.
• Click-through rate: As a third tactic to improve your Google Ads quality score, focus on turning impressions into clicks at a higher rate. The best way to do this is to think carefully about what your prospects are trying to accomplish and shape your offers to match their goals.

You can’t improve your Google Ads quality scores until you know how you stack up. With the help of our free Google Ads Performance Grader, you can get the huge head start you need

Click-through rate (CTR) measures the percentage of clicks advertisers receive on their ads per the number of impressions. "Impressions" refers to how often your ad is viewed-if your ad has a lot of impressions but no clicks, you will have a low CTR, which generally reduces the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Click-through rate is important because it affects your Quality Score, making a high CTR an essential component of a profitable Google Ads campaign.

Google Ads and other search marketing platforms offer pricing discounts for ads that have high relevance, providing searchers with the ads they want to find. Google gives high Quality Scores to advertisers with high Google Ads click-through rates. In sum:

• High click-through rates lead to high Quality Scores.
• High Quality Scores allow you to improve or maintain ad position for lower costs.

Negative keywords serve as essential building blocks in establishing a successful keyword list.

Adding a negative keyword to your Google Ads ad group or campaign ensures that your ad will not appear for search queries containing that term. Using negative keywords in your Google Ads campaign is beneficial because they:

• Filter Out Unwanted Ads - Creating a negative keyword ensures that your ad doesn’t show for that particular term.
• Allow You to Reach the Most Appropriate Audience - By ensuring that only relevant queries trigger your ad, you are more likely to reach an audience that is likely to convert.
• Reduce Cost per Click and Increase ROI - Don’t waste money on unwanted impressions and clicks from irrelevant searches that won’t convert to sales. Using negative keywords helps put a stop to wasted spend.

Finding negative keywords and adding them to your account can be a difficult and tedious process. Digging through Google's search query reports is a slow, redundant process, and Google Ads limits how much query data is visible to advertisers.

WordStream offers an innovative negative keyword tool that makes finding negative keywords easy. It’s also a proactive method of negative keyword discovery, enabling you to weed irrelevant keywords out of your campaigns before they can cost you a cent.

To learn more about how to use negative keywords, read our free white paper on negative keywords.

Having a well-crafted landing page is a big component of a good Google Quality Score. From the moment a prospective customer reaches your landing page, everything should be tailored to helping the customer find what they are searching for and assist them towards a conversion.

A successful landing page requires a number of different elements:

• Keyword Segmentation - Different types of keywords should take visitors to different landing pages with their own customized offers.
• Navigability - Users should be able to easily find what they are looking for and move around your site.
• Compelling Offer - If your ad references special products, have those products be front and center on the landing page. You should give visitors a reason to stay.
• Focused Page Content - Optimize each landing page by authoring page content around groups of relevant, narrowly focused keywords.

The better the landing page, the more conversions you are likely to achieve. Expertly designed landing pages have a powerful impact on PPC marketing campaigns.

• Organic Search Benefits: Keyword-relevant content results in higher rankings in the SERPs for the keywords you’re targeting, bringing more visibility and more traffic.
• Pay-Per-Click Benefits: Keyword-specific Google Ads landing pages are much more likely to earn strong Quality Scores and high conversion rates, as the landing pages will be more aligned with the searcher’s intent.

While a better optimized landing page will help increase conversion rates, depending on what you are trying to persuade visitors to do, what constitutes a "good" conversion rate will vary.

A "good" conversion rate depends on what the desired conversion is. Conversion rates will tend to be higher if visitors are asked to sign up with a simple form to receive something free. If visitors have to fill out a lengthy survey or provide credit card information, conversion rates will be lower. While conversions can range from 0-50%, 2% is quite common.

Nearly everyone has been there before. You dedicate a ton of valuable time and energy to building a Google Ads campaign and writing advertisements for your business. You’re certain there’s no way you could make your ads any better, and you’re excited to watch the clicks and conversions roll in.

But then, after your ads have been live for a couple weeks, you notice something troubling—they’re not showing up in the Google search results. To confirm that you’re not going crazy—trust us when we say that you’re not—you search a variety of words and phrases related to your business. You’re definitely seeing ads at the top of the search results, but none of them are yours. What in the world is going on here?

Like we said: This is a question nearly every business owner and digital marketer mutters to themselves at some point. And that’s precisely the reason WordStream created the Google Ads Performance Grader in the first place—to give you an in-depth, actionable explanation as to why your Google ads aren’t showing up in the search results.

In order to give you that explanation, the Performance Grader runs a free, instant Google Ads account audit on your behalf. Although using the Grader is the only way to fully evaluate your Google Ads account, we’ve learned over the years that there’s a handful of broadly applicable answers to the question Why aren’t my Google ads showing up?

Let’s go over a few of those answers now.

• Your ads weren’t getting clicked. Although your Google ads aren’t showing up now, it’s possible that they were showing up when you initially set them live. If those impressions weren’t turning into clicks, however, that would signify to Google that your ads weren’t resonating with the users who saw them. With the help of a Google Ads account evaluator like ours, you can see how your click-through rates stack up against standards.
• Your keywords and ads don’t closely match. When determining which ads to show for a particular search query, Google Ads looks closely at keyword relevance—a measure of how closely your ads match the keywords they’re tied to. A free Google Ads account audit is a great way to evaluate how well you’re doing with keyword relevance.
• Your ads and landing pages don’t closely match. When picking the winners of a particular ad auction, Google Ads doesn’t only look at the relationship between your target keywords and your ads; you’re also judged on the relationship between your ads and your landing pages. Simply put, you need to deliver a seamless, cohesive user experience across your ads and landing pages. Once again, our free Google Ads account evaluator can provide the insights you need.

The following are a few valuable resources worth researching:

1. The Official Google Ads Site
2. Google Ads Articles on Search Engine Journal
3. Articles on PPC Marketing at Search Engine Watch
4. Paid Search resources at Search Engine Land
5. The Google Ads Learning Center

The AdWords Grader has been applauded by various media outlets, recommending it as a fantastic tool that can help improve your ad campaigns. 

See what trusted sources have to say about WordStream's Google Ads Performance Grader:

"Convenient, fast audits? Vertical benchmark data? There’s a tool for that. Enter Wordstream’s [Google Ads] Grader."

    - John Lee of Clix Marketing (Read the full WordStream review)

"The company has refined the tool based on the wealth of past audit history to give advertisers performance benchmarks within their own industries."

    - Ginny Marvin of Search Engine Land (Read the full WordStream review)

"The [Google Ads] Grader connects with your Google [Ads] account, downloads specific reports, and analyzes them to provide insight."

    - Jessica Lee of Search Engine Watch (Read the full WordStream review)

"What excites me the most [about the Google Ads Grader] is the ‘PPC Best Practices’ scorecard which indicates whether or not the account is opted into such aspects as conversion tracking, geo-targeting (essential for small and medium businesses) and usage of ad-extensions like site-links and business phone numbers."

    - Graeme Lipshitz of Memeburn

"The [Google Ads Grader] tool is efficient enough to provide insightful analysis on par with the audits one would receive from an agency or a consultant."

    - Navneet Kaushal of Page Traffic Buzz

"This [Google Ads Grader] tool is easy to use and provides the same kind of account analysis you might get from a consultant or agency. It gives you actionable insights. What’s not to like?"

    - Claudia Bruemmer of Top Ten Wholesale

"Do you toss and turn all night, unsure if your Google PPC campaigns are measuring up? Better take a trip over to WordStream to get a free audit through the [Google Ads] Performance Grader."

    - Gavin Dunaway of Adotas

"While there are no universally determined benchmarks for good [Google Ads] campaigns, the [Google Ads] Performance Grader from WordStream goes a remarkably long way towards establishing standards for this."

    - Marshall Sponder of Web Metrics Guru

"This tool would be highly beneficial for medium and small-sized businesses."

    - Jitesh Pillai of Ebrandz

"We’re really excited about the help this tool can offer PPC advertisers as they work on more efficiently managing their PPC campaigns and improving their ad text writing techniques. Congratulations to WordStream on a great new free PPC tool!"

    - Tom Demers of Boost CTR

Give it [Google Ads Performance Grader] a try. (It’s free—why not?) I’m willing to bet you will learn something you can use—either to improve a campaign or to reduce the amount of money you’re wasting. Either way, you win.

    - Jeff Haden of BNet

"The areas that this new tool focuses on can have a profound effect on your account’s overall performance. I would recommend you give it a try to see how you compare."

    - Chad Summerhill, writer of PPC Prospector blog

I’m impressed with the results... I think [the Google Ads Grader] is a valuable addition to any competitive analysis of PPC.

    - PPC Without Pity

"...the [Google Ads] Grader tool gives a great overview of general account performance and areas of possible improvement, and is definitely worth checking out!"

    - Jessica Niver of PPC Hero