Pay Less & Rank Higher: The Importance of Quality Score
Energy Circle clients often hear about quality score and how it plays into a well-managed Google AdWords account. Whether you are a client or not, it’s important to understand what it is, and how it relates to your search engine marketing campaigns.
What is Quality Score & Why is it Important?
Quality score is the rating that Google gives your paid ads based on relevance and is factored on a scale of 1-10 (10 being most relevant and 1 being least relevant). Google doesn’t just look at the relevance of ad copy and keywords used, quality score is actually determined by a number of functions including copy, keywords and landing page experience.
Quality score plays heavily into how your ads rank and how much you pay. The higher the quality score, the better potential ranking and the lower you pay. There lies the importance - because who doesn’t want to pay less to rank higher?
How to Improve Quality Score
There are a few things you can do to improve your quality score. The first is to look at your ads. Pay attention to the ad copy and the keywords and search terms you are targeting.
Are they relevant? Do they make sense together?
If you have an ad talking about installing solar panels but your keywords are for windmills and water turbines, Google may not see the relevance — even if you want to target them. Changing the ad copy to say why solar is better than windmills and water turbines can help improve your quality score.
Another way to improve the quality score of your ad set would be to look at the landing page experience. Google looks at how relevant the landing page copy is to the ad copy and keywords you’re targeting. Make sure the user experience is good, and the copy on the page makes sense in relation to the ads and keywords.
It’s Not Just Quality Score
While improving quality score isn’t the be-all-end-all for a successful AdWords campaign, it is a key factor that is often overlooked. It’s important to actively manage your AdWords account — look at bidding structure, keywords, ad sets, ad copy, A/B testing, etc. Your negative keyword list is as important as your actual keywords list and making sure you have the appropriate broad match and exact match terms. If you are selling solar installations, you probably don’t want kids researching the ‘solar system’ clicking on your ads and costing you money.