What Factors Contribute to Quality Score?
Quality Score measures the relevance and effectiveness of an ad for a specific audience, but how exactly is Quality Score calculated? How does Google assign a quality score to your advertisement? As with many of Google’s proprietary metrics, the methodology for calculating the quality score is not totally transparent, so we can’t say exactly how it’s being done.
What we do know is that there are three major factors influencing quality score, along with a couple of other additional factors that play a small role. The three main components of the quality score are:
Expected Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Google, Yahoo! and Bing have all revealed that the primary factor driving quality scores is the expected CTR of a keyword and matched advertisement based on historical data. In its quality score formula, Google accounts for the expected CTR of a keyword and matched advertisement along with the historical CTR of the entire adwords account and the display URLs in the ad group.
Put simply, you’re more likely to have a higher quality score if you consistently:
- Use an advertisement and keyword that generate a high CTR
- Have a track record of creating advertisements with a high CTR
- Send traffic to a URL that is historically correlated with a high CTR
Ad Relevance
Ad relevance is a determination of how well your advertisement caters to the expectations of users. The three main components here are the chosen keyword, the ad content or copy and the target URL. All three of these factors should be aligned with the expectations of the user when they see your ad after typing in a search term or key phrase into Google’s search engine.
While CTR measures your ability to generate clicks, ad relevance is a metric that quantifies how relevant your advertisement is to users searching for your targeted keyword.
Landing Page Experience
The advertisement is just one stage in the customer journey, and it should seamlessly flow into the next stage: a landing page on your website. If a user clicks on an ad for “Used Surfboard”, your landing page should contain the keyword “Used Surfboard”. It should probably also contain some useful information or purchasing options about Used Surfboard, but the goal is to link to a page that matches the customer intent.
Google measures numerous factors about your landing page to evaluate the experience, including loading times, bounce rate, site navigation, content originality, and other factors.
