6 Tips for Increasing Your Quality Score in Google AdWords

If you’re actively running Google AdWords campaigns, you know that Quality Score is a key component to a successful campaign. Many people find Quality Score to be extremely frustrating and confusing, while Google sees it as a simple metric determined by the following:

☑️  Expected clickthrough rate

☑️  Ad relevance

☑️  Landing page experience

What you might not realize is that many other factors could be impacting your Quality Score. Most of the time, you can’t solve Quality Score issues from the Google AdWords interface — you have to do some additional digging.

Every Google Search campaign has a Quality Score. By default, Quality score is hidden. Here’s how you can show it in your interface:

1. Click on the Keywords tab in your AdWords account.

2. Click “Columns” then “Customize columns.”

3. Click the “Attributes” section and add Quality Score.

Today, we’ll share with you additional tips and actions that can increase your Google AdWords Quality Score.

1. Increase your CTR

A high CTR (click-through rate) means that users are clicking on your ad when their search query matches with one of your keywords. Increasing your CTR will lead to a lower CPC (cost per click). If you have a low CTR, Google will give you a low Quality Score, which leads to increased costs in the long run.

For tips on increasing your CTR, check out these articles:

🔗  Ten Ways to Improve Your AdWords Click-Through Rate (CTR)

🔗  How to Write PPC Ads with High CTR: BoostCTR Interview

2. Analyze your search impressions share data

It’s important to analyze search impression share data. Impression share (IS) is the number of impressions you've received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive. Eligibility is based on your current ads' targeting settings, approval statuses, bids and quality.

If your search impression share is low, you can increase it in two ways: 1) By increasing your daily budgets or boosting bids to rank in higher positions and 2) by using broad match modified keywords (using keywords in exact and phrase match will result in slow impression growth).  

3. Group keywords in ad groups to improve quality score

Structuring your campaigns into smaller yet targeted ad groups is crucial for a good Quality Score. By following this practice, you’re increasing the relevancy between the search query and the ad. Don’t have just one or two ad groups in your campaigns.

After initial keywords research, look at your keywords list and group them into logical groups or themes. This will help you to make your ad groups focused and relevant.

Many B2B companies fail to follow this practice and end up paying more than those who do understand how Quality Score really works. 

 Many B2B companies fail to follow this practice
and end up paying more than those who do understand how Quality Score really works. 

4. Write high-quality text ads

Writing high-quality text ads can be challenging because of all the information you have to fit into a small amount of space.

Make sure you choose the ad copy that’s closely related to your keywords to increase the relevance of your keywords to each ad. Increasing the relevance will increase your Quality Score.

You also want to add your keywords to the ad copy. There are two ways to do that: by manually adding keywords to your ads or by using dynamic keywords insertion (DKI). Dynamic keywords insertion option will insert keywords automatically in your ad copy.

Here’s a more detailed article from Johnathan Dane from Unbounce:

🔗  How to Write the Highest-Performing AdWords Ads, Ever.

5. Check your landing page load speed

Landing page load speed has become an important factor in calculating Quality Score. Spend some time analyzing your page load speed. Internet users have increasingly short attention spans, and more and more often, we see users clicking on ads and bouncing even before the page has loaded. To prevent that from happening, optimize your landing pages to decrease their load speed as much as possible.

One of the simplest ways to improving your load speed is to host your website in the location you serve your customers. In other words, if your customers are U.S.-based, don’t host your website in the UK.

Besides that, there are many ways you can optimize your landing page. Here’s a great list of best practices for speeding up your website.

6. Keep an eye on your bounce rates

There is no documentation from Google that says bounce rate can decrease your Quality Score, although some have speculated this may be true.

While bounce rates do not directly affect your QS, high bounce rates indicate there is something wrong with your keywords, ads or landing page.

When that happens, make sure you’re conveying the right message on your landing page and your ads. This could mean changing either of them or both.

*BONUS* 7. Consider a Quality Score tracker script

Before we go, we’d like to share one extra tip with you. In order to track quality score changes over time and have them documented, we suggest you use a Quality Score tracker script. It’s easy to implement and incredibly valuable. Here you can find more information on how to set it up.

Google doesn’t store historical Quality Score data in your accounts, so this script will help you to figure out how your Quality score changed over time.