May 28, 2019

Looking for a 10? How to improve your Google Ads Quality Score to (near) perfect levels

So, after a perfect 10?

Well, aren’t we all?

And while I can’t promise that if you follow the steps below you will achieve 10/10 Quality Scores on your Google Ads campaigns, I can promise that’ll it will get you very close, reducing your Cost Per Clicks and increasing your Return on Ad Spend along the way.

Here are the most effective and proven ways to increase your Quality Score:

1) Have small, tightly-themed ad groups

Google rewards keywords by way of higher Quality Scores when the keyword closely matches the ad headlines. And, you can only create headlines that are very relevant to your keyword if you don’t have too many keywords within each ad group.

Think about it: Say, you’re targeting a keyword such as “self assessment tax  accountant’.You should have at least one ad headline that has that same keyword in the headline (and another headline which uses a more creative headline so you can split test).

If you had several keywords within the ad group such as self assessment tax accountant, self assessment accountant London, self assessment London, you won’t be able to create one single headline that closely matches all.

Start thinking in terms of structuring your account using Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGs). As the name suggest, you will only have one keyword per ad group which will therefore allow you to create ads that are highly relevant to the target keyword, thus checking 2 out of the 3 boxes that make up the Quality Score score.

Expected Click-Through Rate (CTR): How likely is someone to click your ad when Google serves it for the keyword they type in?

Ad Relevance: Does the ad make sense to appear when someone searches for a particular keyword?

Landing Page Experience: Does the information on the landing page correspond to what the ad is offering, and vice versa?

2) Improve your landing pages

You can have the most detailed and tightly-themed campaign in the world but if your landing page is not doing its job of making it easy for your visitors to buy your product or enquire about your service, your Quality Score is going to take a hit.

Out of the several factors, here are the main ones that’ll help you improve your landing page experience score:

Increase your website’s load speed – Make sure your website loads fast because slow loading times won’t only have a negative impact on your Quality Score, it will also limit your ROI

Improve conversion rate – The purpose of your digital marketing campaigns is to generate enquiries and/or sales so make sure your website you’ve optimised your website for conversions.

Lower bounce Rates – Having a form visible above-the-fold, the landing page’s headline matching the keyword, quick loading times will all help to improve your Bounce Rate.

If you aren’t sure what your Bounce Rates should be, the image to the right should give you some averages based on different sectors.

Make sure your on-page SEO is excellent – Your landing page already have titles but make sure the main headline(s) is using the H1 attribute as that has a bearing to the landing page experience score of Quality Score.

For example, on our Google Ads management page, we have the headline as “Pay Per Click (PPC) Management London’ which uses the H1 attribute as that is one of our target keywords for SEO and PPC campaigns.

So, you want to make sure that the keyword that took the prospect to your landing page is same or very similar to the H1 title.

If you aren’t sure of these, feel free to contact Flow20 or use a tool such as this one to check.

3) Increase your Click-Through Rates (CTR)

One of the most effective ways to improve your Google Ads’s Quality Score is to increase your ad’s CTR. Here are some tips:

Use all relevant ad extensions – sitelinks, callouts, rich snippets and so on…the more real-estate your ad occupies, the higher the chance of it getting clicked.

Don’t waste ad copy allowance – Currently (May 2019) Google Ads gives you 30 characters for the 3 headlines and 90 characters for the 2 lines of description. Making use of the allowance in full is another way to increase the amount of room your ad takes which can result in getting it more clicks.

Bid competitively – Make sure you’re bidding enough for your target keywords as low ad positions will generally result in lower CTR which in turn impacts your Quality Score negatively.

So, there you have it, some tried and tested ways on how to improve your Quality Score. Take the time to implement these and you will begin seeing your Google Ads game improving in no time, bringing you one step closer to the perfect score.

Conclusion

To increase the chances of paying the least possible for your clicks, make sure you focus on improving your Quality Scores.

For help with your digital marketing campaigns, whether that’s Google Ads, Facebook, LinkedIn,  Social Media or with designing landing pages get in touch with us today. Or, view all our services here.

Flow20 now also offers Facebook ad courses and Instagram ads courses.

About Shirish Agarwal

Shirish Agarwal is the founder of Flow20 and looks after the PPC and SEO side of things. Shirish also regularly contributes to leading digital marketing publications such as Hubspot, SEMRush, Wordstream and Outbrain. Connect with him on LinkedIn.