What is Quality Score?
This is the metric that is placed on your keywords within your Google AdWords account. It is a rating out of 10 that determines how strong your keyword is to both your ad-copy(s) & relevance of your linking landing page. This score is used by Google to determine your cost per click (CPC) & multiplied by your maximum bid to determine your ad rank in the ad auction process.
Why does it matter?
What this means is that having a high ‘Quality Score’ means you pay less to be in the top spot on the page for your targeted search querie. The CPC difference between a 5/10 ‘Quality Score’ & a 9/10 score in the same position can be substantial, ie. $0.50 vs. $2.00.
What exactly makes up Quality Score?
A number of attributes but in order of importance I would rank them:
• Your click through rate (CTR) vs. expected CTR
• How relevant your ad is to your keyword(s)
• Landing page quality & relevance
• The relevance of keywords within an ad-group to each other
• Your historical AdWords account performance
A simplified diagram of Quality Score components
Some examples of keywords & their actual quality scores below:
As you can see there is a wide variance in ‘Quality Score’ within this keyword portfolio. It is not surprising that that the higher quality score keywords contain brand terms as they generally have higher relevance between keyword > ad-copy > landing page. Their avg. CPC is also quite low at $0.86 compared to the lower scoring keyword which as $2.67.
Looking at that CPC for [timber window repairs Melbourne] at $2.67 per click! Why so high?! The reason can often be due to a low CTR, however in this case the keyword has a respectable CTR of 25.93% so looking further along the column we can see AdWords has marked ‘Ad relevance’ below average & ‘Landing page exp.’ As average. Now lets look deeper, what is the ad-copy for [timber window repairs Melbourne]?
What’s missing from this ad? First the keyword [timber window repairs Melbourne] is in the headline, which is a good start, however it does not appear within the body description! Although the H1 is very relevant there is no supporting description in relation to ‘timber’.
When people search on Google they have one track minds. They know exactly what they want so they can type it in to Google & then their brains scan for that exact word. People’s eyes also scan top left to right when viewing web pages. This is important to keep in mind when writing good ads.
Best Practice Ad-Copy Writing for Quality Score
So what should we focus on when writing a good ad?
1. Keyword in the headline
2. Keyword in the body
3. Keyword in the URLs
4. Remember that people scan left to right
5. Remember that people have very short attention spans on Google
6. Tell people what you want them to do
Knowing that, this is how I would write the ad for [timber Window Repairs Melbourne]
Tell People What You Want Them To Do!
One final tip is to add a call to action as the last line telling people what you want them to do. This works well as it sets their expectation when they click, making them more likely to do that very thing! Want them to buy online? Tell them!
I guarantee you this new ad will out-perform the existing ad by at least 50% higher click through rate, which would lead to much higher Quality Score & lower CPC. It’s still ‘on-brand’ but it just speaks to the user and plays by Google’s rules. It is, after all, Google’s playing field.
This has been another insight from the team here at SYNQ Digital
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