Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 107 - Quality Score Explained

Anyone can set up a Google Ads campaign, but very few people know how to make it profitable in the long run.

In fact, many advertisers I meet are stuck in this endless loop of responding to Google Ads notifications and CPCs are up and CPAs are down and what are we going to do and oh my gosh, and…woah.

Today, we are going to go under the hood to look at the strategic foundations that separates the Google Ads pros from the amateurs. We're talking about data integrity, creative leverage, and the honest truth about what actually moves the needle in Google Ads today because it's a tale as old as time. Well, at least a tale as old as AdWords. 

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google, and now I work for you.

This is Inside Google Ads, Episode 107: Quality Score Explained.

Let's start with a quick primer. What is Quality Score and why should you care?

Remember, Search ads on Google run on an auction. But unlike a typical auction, it's not necessarily the person who's willing to pay the most who wins. Google uses a proprietary system called Ad Rank to determine where your ad shows, whether it shows at all, and how much you pay. And the formula for Ad Rank is quite simple for such a complex algorithm. 

Ad Rank is a function of price and quality. Price is your bid, probably set by Smart Bidding by now. And quality is your ad quality as summarized by your Quality Score.

This system ensures that users see relevant ads, that advertisers get relevant customers, and that Google makes hundreds of billions of dollars.

So why should you care? Because the higher your ad quality, the less you have to pay per click. And I don't know about you, but I like being able to pay less for my clicks.

Now, before I explain exactly how you're going to use Quality Score to do that, I want to make sure we distinguish Quality Score from two other numbers people often confuse it with, Optimization Score and Ad Strength.

Quality Score is a keyword level metric that's determined by actual ad performance in the auction.

Ad Strength is an ad level metric. It is determined by best practices before your ads enter the auction. It is not based on actual performance metrics. So while that poor, average, good, or excellent rating you see can seem scary or seem exciting, it doesn't actually have to do with real performance in the auction.

And then Optimization Score is not based on your keywords or your ads. It's a Google sales metric. Google just wants to know if you are reviewing the recommendations it's surfacing to you. As long as you are looking at recommendations, you can get a perfect Optimization Score. That's because whether you accept a recommendation or dismiss a recommendation, you get the same Optimization Score uplift. So if you want a 100% Optimization Score, because you care about such things, you can… dismiss, dismiss, dismiss, dismiss, and boom, there you go.

Of these three, Optimization Score, Ad Strength and Quality Score, the last one, Quality Score, is the only one you actually need to think about. And that's why we're doing this whole episode about it.

So how do you find your Quality Score and how do you improve it? 

Quality Score lives at the keyword level, which means you need to go over to audiences, keywords and content and keywords to see your Quality Score. And then you may need to add a few columns to your report. The columns you're looking for are Quality Score, exp. CTR, which stands for expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page exp., which stands for landing page experience. You'll also see some ones with “hist.” beside them for historical, I generally don't use those.

In the Quality Score column, you'll see a numerical rating from 1 to 10. Don't obsess over getting 10 out of 10. Seven is a really good score. Even 6 is fine. You just want to focus your energy on fixing the ones, twos, threes, and fours. 

I also recommend that you analyze Quality Score at an ad group level. And what I mean by that is instead of obsessing over the Quality Score for each individual keyword, look at all the keywords in a given ad group and then look for trends.

If most keywords in the ad group have a Quality Score of 7 and just one has a 2, don't worry about it. But if most keywords in an ad group have a Quality Score of 2 and just one has a 7, you should worry about that.

If you just see a dash in the Quality Score column, then it means for whatever reason, Google has not been able to assign you a Quality Score yet. Your ad quality in the auction is still being determined. You're just not able to see that diagnostic in your account right now.

In each of the next three columns, you'll see either a below average, average, or above average rating. And again, I recommend focusing at the ad group level. So if you're looking at 10 keywords in an ad group and they have mostly average ad relevance, mostly average landing page experience, and mostly below average expected CTR, expected CTR is where you should focus. Because all keywords in the ad group share the same ad and typically the same final URL a lot of the improvements you will do for one keyword will actually impact all of them.

So how do you actually improve your Quality Score and therefore improve your ads performance? 

Let's start with the first component, Ad Relevance. This measures if your keyword matches your ad and your landing page. I call this the lowest-hanging fruit to fix because it's the only component of Quality Score that's completely within your control since you write your ads and you write your landing page. 

1. First things first, make sure your keywords are actually in your headlines.

If someone searches for “red high heel shoes,” your ad should say red high heel shoes, not just footwear. 

And if you're struggling with this, I recommend using Dynamic Keyword Insertion to boost your ad relevance. This tells Google to insert the keyword into your ad that matched to the user's search. So if you're using Exact Match keywords or Phrase Match keywords, this can be really helpful. If you're using Broad Match though, there's generally no point in using Dynamic Keyword Insertion. 

Actually, sometimes what I recommend for advertisers, again, this isn't a blanket recommendation, just something I sometimes recommend is when you're using Broad Match keywords, is that it can be helpful to take your top 10 to 20 search terms and add them as Exact Match keywords in the same ad group. This isn't really going to have an impact on ad serving because you are already covering those searches anyway but this will let you potentially use Dynamic Keyword Insertion in a more meaningful way than Broad Match alone.

2. Next is the landing page experience. 

This one is the trickiest to influence, especially if you're a freelancer or agency and you're not directly in control of the website. This looks at things like does your website load quickly? Is it mobile friendly? Does it have original content? Is it navigable? It's actually the place where I find that SEO and PPC tend to interact the most since the things that give you a good landing page experience for paid ads purposes, will also give you a good landing page experience for SEO and LLM purposes, and honestly, just for people purposes. Are people going to have a good time and find what they need if they get to your landing page?

The one thing I do recommend always doing if you have generally below average landing page experience is to use Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool to run a speed test on your site. This is one of the most common culprits of poor landing page experience. You want your website to load in two seconds or less.

3. Last but not least is expected CTR. 

This is, in my opinion, the most important component of Quality Score, but also in my experience, the most convoluted to fix. Remember, your click-through rate is your clicks divided by impressions. Of all the times your ad showed, how often did someone click on them? Expected CTR looks at what Google expects your click-through rate to be versus your auction competitors. 

This is why you can have an objectively good CTR, like 7% or 8% on non-brand Search, and still have a below average expected CTR. That tells you that your auction competitors, which you may not consider your real-life competitors, but the people you're competing against for searches, generally have higher click-through rate than you do. 

And remember, Google only makes money when users click on the ads because you, as an advertiser, only pay for a click, not for an impression. So of course Google prefers to show ads that are more likely to be clicked on and will charge those advertisers less for the privilege of their ads being clicked on in the first place.

If you're struggling with expected CTR, which is probably the most common thing I do see Google Ads practitioners struggle with, here's exactly what you're going to do. First, you're going to check your auction insights to see who you're up against. Then you're going to type each of those domains into the Google Ads Transparency Center to see what their ads look like. I can all but guarantee that when you do this, it will become pretty clear why people are preferring their ads to your ads. So don't copy exactly what they say. Take inspiration from it to see how you can improve your own. I go into more detail and specific examples of this in The Insider newsletter. I'll include that link in the episode description.

Then what you're going to do is check your Search Terms Report and see if part of the problem is that you're showing up for a lot of irrelevant searches. If your Search Terms Report looks like it belongs to some other business, but not yours, you can add negative keywords. But instead I recommend addressing the root cause of the problem, which is usually some combination of wrong bid strategy or incorrect conversion tracking or wrong match types.

And that is your framework for how you can improve your Google Ads performance by improving your Quality Score, addressing ad relevance, landing page experience, and expected CTR.

Now before we wrap up this episode, I already know there are going to be naysayers in my comments. People who say Quality Score doesn't matter, it's just a diagnostic tool, it's not an auction input. So allow me to clear this up for you.

Yes, the number 1 to 10 you see in the Quality Score column is a diagnostic tool. That number is not being put into the ad auction to determine performance. However, your actual ad quality, which Google calculates in real time for every single user search and every auction, is absolutely a key input for ad rank. And your real-life ad quality is summarized by your Quality Score. 

Allow me to quote Google directly:

“Ad quality is an estimate of the experience that users have when they see your Search ads and the quality of their experience once they reach your landing page. Our assessment of the quality of your ad is summarized in your Quality Score, which you can monitor in your Google Ads account. Higher ad quality generally leads to better performance, including better ad positions and lower cost.” 

I'll include the direct link to that Google Ads Help Center article in the episode description as well.

So while you can't see the real time calculation of ad quality, that 1 to 10 Quality Score is the best proxy we have. If you ignore it, then you are completely ignoring the quality half of the price and quality ad rank equation. And if you ignore quality, the only way you can win more auctions is by paying more. I don't know about you, but I prefer not to pay a premium for low quality ads.

And just in case you're still not convinced, by the way, I recently had Fred Vallaeys, the CEO of Optmyzr and one of the original Google employees who worked on building AdWords, as a guest for my Inside Google Ads course members. So of course, I had to ask him about this. 

And it was interesting. He shared a story with my members about how he actually worked on Quality Score for many years. He gave us some really interesting nuance and insight about how Quality Score works.

That recording is available for my Inside Google Ads course members. But here's a little snippet I had to share with you right here on the Inside Google Ads podcast.

Jyll: This is something that really grinds my gears when people say that Quality Score doesn't matter because it's just a diagnostic tool. And so I would love for you to fact check my response and tell me if I'm right or wrong on this because you know this so well.

So what I always say is that the Quality Score that you see in your account at the keyword level is a diagnostic tool. It's kind of like made up to show what's going on. But separately from that there is a real Quality Score assigned to your keywords in the auction and that is a key input into Ad Rank. It's just the Quality Score you see in your account is not exactly the same thing as the actual score that's calculated in the auction.

Is that the correct understanding?

Fred: Fact check: correct.

Jyll: Yes! Okay.

Fred: Keep subscribing to Jyll.

Jyll: Thank you, Fred.

There you have it, straight from someone who actually built Quality Score, confirming that what I've told you today is true.

The last important thing I want to point out about Quality Score before we wrap up this episode is it's not just about price. Quality also impacts whether or not your ads are even eligible to show up on searches. Where on the page your ads appear? At the top, the new middle ad section, the bottom, or who even knows what else Google is going to be thinking up for placements? And whether your assets like sitelinks or images or callouts or snippets can show. That's determined by ad quality too. And we know that when those assets show, your CTR generally improves which means your expected CTR will generally improve and it creates this nice hamster wheel of goodness for your ads.

Some things that do not directly impact your Quality Score include your conversion tracking, your bid strategy, and your campaign type. For example, PMax Search ads versus Search campaign Search ads. 

Google also says that your match type doesn't affect ad quality, like a Broad Match and Exact Match version of a keyword should have the same Quality Score because Quality Score is calculated based on exact searches for your keyword. That may have been true historically, and although Google's documentation says that, it's not been my experience with my own accounts and my Google Ads coaching clients. Exact Match keywords tend to have higher Quality Scores, and Broad Match keywords tend to have lower Quality Scores. 

Maybe the match type itself isn't the root cause of that. Absolutely. But like I said, something like Dynamic Keyword Insertion is pretty pointless if you use Broad Match keywords. There's no way you're going to have the perfect ad text for all the thousands of searches that can match to that keyword. So your CTR won't be as high so your expected CTR won't be as high. That doesn't mean don't use Broad Match, by the way. It just means the process of optimizing Quality Score can be a bit different depending on if you have a very narrow or a very wide Google Ads strategy.

But again, don't obsess over these small details. Use Quality Score overall as your guide to improved ad quality, better ad rank, more efficient Google Ads performance, and better results.

Today's Insider Challenge is this. You're auditing an account and you see an ad group with Quality Scores ranging from 2 to 4. When you look at the explainer columns, you see ad relevance is generally above average, landing page experience is generally average, and expected CTR is generally below average. What do you look into first and why? 

The beauty of the Insider Challenge is there's no right or wrong answer, just an opportunity to stretch your brain on real life Google Ads problem solving.

Last Episode's Challenge, Episode 106, was this. You are auditing a Google Ads account and you see that for a specific campaign, the CPA has doubled in the last 7 days compared to the previous 30 days. It looks like performance has fallen off the cliff. However, when you look at the Attribution Report, you see it takes 12 days on average for users to convert. Does this change your diagnosis of the performance drop? Why or why not?

For me, of course, this finding changes my diagnosis completely because we have conversion lag!

You see, Google Ads counts a conversion based on the date the ad click happened, not the date the conversion occurred on your website. So if the user clicks on your ad on day one and doesn't convert until day 12, Google will then retroactively add that conversion to the day one stats.

Since we know that the average conversion lag is 12 days, and that's just an average, by the way, looking at the last seven days of performance means you're analyzing incomplete data. You see 100% of the cost, because the clicks have already happened, but only a fraction of the conversions, because they haven't happened yet.

High cost divided by low incomplete conversions means artificially doubled CPA. So here's what you need to do instead. 

First, stop looking at such recent data to make optimization decisions. Unfortunately, you're in the scenario with conversion lag where, as I say, you have to optimize by looking in the rear view mirror. 12 days is our average days to conversion, but it could be longer than that. So you're probably going to want at least three weeks, if not four weeks before evaluating performance. Practically, this means that let's say it is March 1st, you may now look at January's data, but you shouldn't be looking at February's data. In fact, you should be waiting until April 1st to measure how you did in February to give those conversions time to come in.

Second, if you don't want to wait that long, you can look at the conversions by conversion time column. This adjusts your reporting view so that you see conversions on the day they actually happen rather than on the day the ad click happened. But note that your Smart Bidding doesn't use this to optimize. This is just a reporting tool. It doesn't actually change how your ads perform. 

And then finally, you've got to educate your client or your boss, if you have a client or a boss. You need to establish that reporting cadence that accounts for this lag so you can properly tell the story of how Google Ads are performing.

What about you? Would you do something different? 

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales, and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.