One of the many ways we help our clients at Final Piece Consulting is by running PPC (pay-per-click) ad campaigns. The world of marketing has shifted to focus on digital advertisements, as the tools at our disposal can help clients engage directly with the demographics most likely to convert into purchases.
If you’ve discussed PPC ads before, you’ve likely heard about the Google Quality Score. As a trusted Google Partner, we’re here to help you better understand the uses and limits of your ad campaign’s score. So let’s dive in.
What the Quality Score Measures
Google analyzes ads to determine how useful that ad campaign would be to a user searching for a specific keyword (or long-form keyword phrase). Ranked from 1 to 10, the score is a way for Google to estimate how well your ad campaign stands to do. As such, it’s a prediction of your ad’s viability.
To arrive at the quality score, Google uses three criteria:
- Ad relevance: This is an estimate of how well your ad relates to a user’s intent when searching for your chosen keyword.
- Expected click-through rate (CTR): This provides a prediction for how often your ad will likely be clicked when it is displayed to users.
- Landing page experience: This metric determines how relevant Google thinks your website’s landing page is to the user’s intent when searching for your chosen keyword.
In this sense, quality score is a measure of how well your ad campaign matches users’ search intent, how likely it is that someone will click on that ad, and how well your website actually matches the users’ search intent once they’ve clicked through to your page.
The Limits of Quality Score
These are all important metrics, but it’s important to remember that quality score is essentially a prediction of how well your ad will do. Google itself says that your ad’s quality score does not affect its ad auction values and is “not a key performance indicator.”
Instead, a good Google Partner like Final Piece Consulting uses an ad’s quality score to diagnose issues if an ad is not performing. For example, we might see that a struggling ad has a low relevance score. This indicates that more keyword optimization needs to be performed.
Let a Google Partner Help You Fix Your Ad Campaign
If you’re just starting out and need help creating and managing a pay-per-click ad campaign, Final Piece Consulting has the tools you need to be successful. We can also help you adjust a struggling PPC campaign by analyzing its quality score, among other diagnostic tools.
Contact Final Piece today to start seeing a better ROI for your ad campaigns.
