Quality score has always been seen as a unicorn; it is one of the hardest metrics to get consistent results in for Google Ads. With all the new automation that Google has been incorporating people are wondering if the quality score metric will be tweaked. And due to automation people have various stances if the quality score is still a valid metric.
Quality Scored Defined
Before we decide if a quality score is still valuable, Let us dive into what a quality score is and how to receive a good one. There are three pieces that create your quality score: ad relevance, ECTR, and landing page experience.
Ad relevance: this is pretty straightforward. You want to make sure the ad that you display closely matches the search query. Google reviews the search query and wants to confirm that your advertisement makes sense for the query. This is considered the easiest step since you have full control over this.
Expected Click-Through Rate (ECTR): This portion is judged by Google to figure out how likely your ad will be clicked based on the search query and the CTR data in the account. This is something that Google is predicting so you do not have a lot of control over this section of the quality score formula.
Landing Page Experience: This is determined by how user-friendly and relevant your landing page is to the searcher based on the search query, ad, and website performance. For example, Google takes into consideration things like page load speed, keywords on the landing page, and relevance to the topic of the keyword. This is also something you can have control over since you can go into your website and tweak whatever you need to further help your page be more relevant to searches.
Based on these factors Google then gives you a score between 1 and 10, 1 is the worst 10 is the best. To get an idea of where people usually grade on this scale, 4-6 is considered good, 7-10 is excellent and 1-4 needs some work.
How Quality Score Works
The reason why quality score is so important is that it helps boost your ad rank. Most people that start advertising don't know that your ad rank is your Max CPC bid x quality score. This helps the little guys compete against bigger accounts that have more money to spend. If you are being aggressive with your bids and you see that you have lost impression share due to rank metrics, then you will want to look at improving your quality score.
Keep in mind that quality score isn’t the end all be all of Google Ads. If you are running out of ideas on how to optimize your account and find that you are losing in ad rank it is definitely a good idea to look into your quality score. Just keep in mind that quality score might not be the issue and it could just be that you need a new PPC strategy. Typically if you have relevant keywords in your ad copy and landing page as well as a good loading speed you should be able to get a quality score of 5 to 7 so just focus there first.
Will Quality Score Be Going Away in 2021
Google has been making a lot of changes over the last couple of years. And they have not made a statement in regards to quality score. Since it is something that can be confusing to new marketers, and many of the changes they have been making are to help new marketers it is something many believe Google will change in the future.