Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 11 - Ad Quality

Do you want to start some controversy among Google Ads influencers? Start talking about Ad Strength, Quality Score, and Optimization Score. Some practitioners swear by them, some ignore them completely, so what should you do with these Google Ads systems?

Let's go Inside Google Ads to answer your burning questions about ad quality.

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales, bringing you more than a decade of Google Ads experience. I worked at Google for six years, and now I make a living showing business owners and marketers how to make more money from their marketing.

In each episode, I answer three questions that you've asked me on social media, sharing my best strategies, tips, tactics, and examples so you can make your Google Ads more effective.

And be sure to stay tuned till the end of the episode where I'll share this week's Insider Challenge for you to solve.

Our first question is about Ad Strength specifically and it comes from Auto Lease 1135 on YouTube. They say, question about Ad Strength. Does a better score mean Google will show the ad more?

Allow me to elaborate. You're probably thinking about Quality Score, which we'll talk about in more detail a bit later in the episode. The Quality Score, just because it's higher, it doesn't mean your ad will show more, necessarily, but it does mean you'll have a higher ad rank, and you can pay less per click than if you had a lower Quality Score.

So, Ad Strength versus Quality Score. What are they and what's the difference? 

Ad Strength is determined by best practices before you run your ad.

It's a good idea to aim for Excellent Ad Strength, as this is most likely to set you up for success. But  Ad Strength is not based on actual performance, and it is not an input into the ad auction.

Each responsive ad you create will get one Ad Strength rating. So think of it as a tool to help you when creating an ad, not a be-all-end-all thing to optimize for.

Now, Quality Score is determined by actual auction performance once your keywords are live. So, it's a good idea, in my opinion, to review your rankings on the three key components of Quality Score. Those are Expected CTR, Ad Relevance and Landing Page Experience, and you can add a column for each to your keyword view.

My recommendation is that you work on fixing the most Below Average one. Google tells you, for each one of those, are you Below Average, Average or Above Average on each of those three components for each active keyword you have.

So, rather than trying to optimize on a keyword-by-keyword basis, let's say you have 10 keywords in an ad group and your Ad Relevance is mostly Above Average and your Landing Page Experience is mostly Average and your Expected CTR is mostly Below Average. You're going to want to work on Expected CTR. Each keyword will get its own Quality Score from 1 to 10 in addition to those rankings on those three components, once there's enough data to do so.

Now, Ad Strength affects Ad Relevance, and Ad Relevance is one component of Quality Score. So, that's the relationship between these two metrics, but no matter what, one thing you can feel confident ignoring is Optimization Score. That is a made up Google Ads sales metric.

If you know you know, and the reason you know is because whether you accept or dismiss a Recommendation has the same impact on your Optimization Score.

So, if you have a Google Ads Recommendation in your account, “add more Broad Match Keywords,” and it says that'll give you 10% more on your Optimization Score. If you accept the Recommendation and make that change, you'll get a 10% increase in Optimization Score. But if you dismiss that and don't make the change, you will also get the 10% increase. The more you know!

And hey, if you're not already following me on social media, you can find me on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Threads, and LinkedIn. The links are all in the episode description. Drop your burning question on any of my posts and you may just get your answer in an upcoming episode.

Next up, we have a question from YouTube. This user asks, when I pin my headline, my Ad Strength score drops. Why? I can't create my ad without pinning a headline because my ad will be messed up. 

So, Google Ads doesn't like pinning because it limits combinations.

Let's back up a step. What is pinning? When you're creating any kind of Responsive Ad and you're typing in the little text box, you may notice this little icon come up that looks like a pin.

If you pin something, that means you're ensuring that it always shows in a certain position.

So let's talk about a Responsive Search Ad. Headlines can show in position one, position two, or position three. And Google is going to create infinite combinations, testing out all your different headlines in all different positions to try to get the best results.

If you pin a headline to position one, that means you only want that headline to show in the first headline slot, not the second or third.

And you can pin things to first or to second or to third, for headlines. You can do this for descriptions and other assets as well.

So, when you create a Responsive Search ad, the first couple of headlines you put in tend to be prioritized and shown first, and as you add other headlines in, they may not be shown as often, especially if you’re adding them later.

But just because you pin something, it doesn't mean it's going to show more, it just means you're guaranteed it'll only show in a certain position.

And interestingly, I don't usually use pinning. The only reason, in my opinion, that you would need to use pinning is if there is some kind of regulation, rule, or requirement in your industry that you have to include something in your ad.

For example, in the financial industry, you may need to include certain disclosures in your ad and pinning can help you do that.

I was actually on a coaching call last month, and my client was so upset because she is working on Google Ads for a company that resells another company's services, and that parent company required certain verbiage to be in the headline, and she just couldn't figure out how to make it do that.

And I was like, “Aha! You need to pin it.” But the key, you can't just pin that one thing to position one. You then have to pin all the other headlines to position two or three. So, the only option Google will have for position one is that one pinned headline, and that's how you can ensure it always shows.

There could be a situation like that where you legitimately need something to show up, but those are few and far between.

So, if you're thinking your ad will be messed up without it, I would challenge that. Will your ad really be messed up without it? If so, you can pin it. Or not. 

And remember, a lower Ad Strength doesn't mean your ad is messed up. It's not like Quality Score. It's not based on actual performance. So yes, your Ad Strength will be lower if you pin, but that's okay. Ad Strength is not the be-all-end-all. It's Google's recommendations of the kind of things that generally lead to better results. It doesn't mean you will get better results. 

If you need a refresher on some of the topics we're discussing today, like Quality Score, ad rank, ad creation, and more, my Google Ads for Beginners course could be a great fit for you. With 40 short lessons explaining the fundamentals of Google Ads in clear and simple language, Google Ads for Beginners will get you ready to tackle your campaigns with confidence.

Learn more at learn.jyll.ca. That's J-Y-L-L dot ca or follow the link in the episode description. 

Last but not least, we have a question from James Talbot on TikTok, who was actually one of my very first followers on that platform three years ago. James asks, does quality refer to correlation to the search? 

This is a question James asked on a video I shared on TikTok about Quality Score.

So as I mentioned earlier, Quality Score has three key components: Expected CTR, Ad Relevance, and Landing Page Experience.

The Google Ads Help Center actually has a great article about this. You can Google “Google Ads Quality Score” for more about that, but in a nutshell, Expected CTR is not exactly the same as Click-through rate (CTR): of all the times your ad shows, how often do people click on it? Expected CTR puts your CTR in the context of other people in the auction. So, even if you have, objectively, a really good CTR, like 8% or 9%, if other ads in your auctions have an even higher CTR than that, you could get a Below Average Expected CTR.

That's the most important component, right? Because Google only makes money if people click on ads, Google wants people to click on the ads, so the Expected Click-through Rate of your ads is the most important component of Quality Score.

Then, Ad Relevance means a user’s search relates to your ad, and your ad relates to the landing page - it’s a fully relevant experience.

So, that's James' question here. Does quality refer to correlation to the search? The Ad Relevance component absolutely does.

And then Landing Page Experience has nothing to do with your ads. That's looking at your website and saying, “Does it load quickly? Is it mobile optimized? Does it have original content?” etc.

Think about it: when someone clicks on a Google Ad to go to your website, Google is taking its customers - even though we don't pay Google for Google Search, we are Google's customers or Google's users, if you want to say - and Google is taking its billions of users a day and directing them to you.

It's sharing its customers with you. And so if Google's going to do that, Google wants to know they're going to have a good experience on your website, because if they get to your website and then five to ten seconds later come back to Google, that means they didn’t find what they were looking for, which means Google failed. 

Google is like a dating app that way, and a dating app is successful when its customers no longer need it because they found love and they're not dating anymore.

And so, Google Search is successful when people leave Google Search and found what they were looking for - which, by the way, is why you see a lot of snippets of things coming into Google and of course, Generative AI is changing all of that, but that's a topic for a future episode!

Coming back to quality, Quality Score is a diagnostic tool to help you understand how to get your ads to perform better. Quality Score is a key component of Ad Rank, which determines whether or not you get to show an ad, and how much you have to pay for that ad. 

I have worked with so many accounts where when Quality Score goes up, performance improves. There are some PPC experts who say, “Quality Score, who cares? I never look at it,” and that's fine, power to them.

In my experience, not just my opinion, in my experience, improving your Quality Score improves the results of your Google Ads, and by improves the results, I mean you get a better ROI, which is what we're all looking for here, right?

So correlation to the search is part of quality, and in my experience, Quality Score is absolutely something to focus on to get better results, whereas Ad Strength is a helpful tool but is nothing to focus on to get better results.

Before we wrap up today, it is time for our new closing segment: the Insider Challenge. This is where I end each episode by posing a Google Ads challenge for you to solve, and you let me know how you'd solve it.

I'm going to share the Episode 11 challenge, and then I'll let you know how I would have handled last episode's challenge.

Okay, new challenge, imagine you're auditing a Google Ads account. You're looking at the keywords and you see Quality Scores of like 4, 5, 6, you know, not terrible, but not good.

You add the three explainer columns to your report and you see that Landing Page Experience and Ad Relevance are generally Average, Expected CTR is Below Average.

What do you look into next?

What, if anything, should the account owner do with that information?

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

At the end of next week's episode, I'll share how I would respond, too, what I would check, but in the meantime, I want to know what you would do.

Shoot me an email to let me know thegooglepro@jyll.ca, that's J-Y-L-L dot ca, or send me a voice note in my Instagram DMs. I'm @the_google_pro on Instagram and links to both of those in the episode description as well.

I do record these episodes a few weeks in advance, so in a few weeks, I will start to share your responses to the challenge. That means that even if you're listening to this episode a month from now, a year from now, you can still participate in the Insider Challenge by leaving me a voice message or writing me a note, and you could be featured on an upcoming episode of Inside Google Ads. 

And now to wrap us up, my response to the Episode 10 challenge. How would I respond to a client who calls me frantic on Easter Sunday saying that traffic has plummeted and there haven't been any conversions all day?

The biggest challenge with this challenge, in my opinion, has nothing to do with Google. It’s client management!

I don't want a client calling me on a Sunday, so I would do some expectation setting and ensure alignment on how communication works, so this doesn't happen again.

To address their concern, I’d remind them that holidays can cause fluctuations, and Easter Sunday is no exception. But I don't want to gaslight them. Maybe there really is an issue, so I’d open up my laptop to see what's going on.

I would use the date comparison feature to see if my impressions, clicks and conversions are significantly down, which I would consider to be at least 20% lower than previous Sundays.

So, if there's like a 5% drop from previous Sundays, I'm not concerned, stuff happens. But 20% or more I consider a significant change.

I would also look at Easter Sunday for the last two years for context as well. Was there a big drop on Easter Sunday in previous years or not?

If there was truly a drop in all three of these metrics – less conversions, less clicks, less impressions  – then I would see if my efficiency metrics were constant, like click-through rate and conversion rate.

What I mean by that is, is the impression drop the thing that's causing the click and conversion drop? Are they proportional?

Or, have clicks dropped by even more than impressions, which means my CTR went down? That would lead to one path of inquiry. 

Or, have conversions dropped by even more than clicks, meaning my conversion rate went down? That would lead to another path of inquiry. 

And also, has my cost decreased or stayed steady or perhaps increased? That would lead to another path of inquiry.

It really is like playing detective and problem solving and deciding where to strategically focus first to solve the problem. 

Assuming that the impression drop is the root cause, and it's an uncharacteristic drop, I would probably still do nothing. It's one day, stuff happens, but if I see this drop persist over the next few days and into the week, I would check my search impression share to better understand why exactly the drop is happening, whether it's just me or the industry, whether it's rank or budget or both, and problem solve from there. 

What would you do? Do you agree? Completely disagree?

Let me know, I want to hear from you. Send me an email or drop me a voice note letting me know how you'd respond to either last week's challenge or this week's challenge.

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

Sign up to get the Inside Google Ads episode transcripts delivered to your inbox each week, for free.