Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 132 - Improve Your Quality Score

Quality Score. It is one of those foundational Google Ads components that you know is important, but actually figuring out how to improve it can be surprisingly difficult. This is something that comes up in so many of my Google Ads coaching calls. So, I knew I needed to dedicate a whole other episode to this topic. 

I'm going to share my practical step-by-step framework for increasing your Quality Score, which will be useful whether you're a Google Ads newbie or an advanced practitioner, especially if you're struggling with the dreaded below average expected click-through rate. And then after I share my own story, I'm going to show you a post I saw on LinkedIn from a different Google Ads practitioner who shows how they actually used Quality Score to decrease their cost per lead. 

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

This is Inside Google Ads, Episode 132: Improve Your Quality Score.

Before we can get to improving your Quality Score, let's do a really quick level set to ensure we all know what we're talking about because I'm not talking about Optimization Score. I'm not talking about Ad Strength. This is your keyword level Quality Score. 

Backing up a step, your ad rank is what determines whether your ads get to show in Google Search results and where on the page they appear. And ad rank is determined by two factors: your ad quality and your bid. 

These days, bidding is mostly taken care of via Smart bidding. So that leaves us with ad quality summarized in your Quality Score.

Because it's true that while the actual Quality Score calculation is a black box, we don't know what the real Quality Score is or we'd all try to game it. Google does give us four diagnostic columns in Google Ads on your keyword report to get an idea of how your real life ad quality is doing. This is your Quality Score, a number from 1 to 10, your expected click-through rate rating, your ad relevance rating, and your landing page experience rating. 

When I'm analyzing Quality Score, I always like to start with ad relevance because this is the only one of those three factors that you totally control. Are your keywords related to your ad? And is your ad related to your landing page? Your keywords should mostly have an above average ad relevance unless you're running a competitor campaign. If not, you're going to want to revisit the basics of responsive search ad creation.

Next is the landing page experience. This is often the trickiest to influence, especially if you're a PPC practitioner who has no control over the landing page. So, if your landing page experience is generally average, that is plenty good enough for me. If it's mostly below average, I would flag that to whoever's in charge of your website. And if you are the one who's in charge of your website, run your landing page through the free page speed insights tool from Google to see if it's a common culprit like slow page load or mobile issues.

That brings us to expected click-through rate, which can really trip people up. You already know that click-through rate, CTR, measures how often people click on your ad when it's shown. Clicks divided by impressions equals click-through rate known as CTR. Your expected click-through rate puts your CTR in the context of your competitor's CTRs. 

Why does that matter? 

Remember, Google only makes money when someone clicks on an ad. So, while you may be willing to pay more for a competitor than a click, if they have a higher click-through rate than you, Google would rather show their ad than yours, even if they're bidding less. 

It's like gambling. Let's say you have a 15% chance of getting $10 or a 4% chance of getting $17. Google will generally prefer the $10 option. Better to likely get some money than no money. This means you could have an objectively good CTR like 7% on non-brand Search and still have a below average expected CTR. That would mean that your auction competitors have more compelling ads or better search term-ad alignment than you do. So, they're getting higher click-through rates than you.

So, how do we fix that?

Here's my framework. 

1. First, identify your auction competitors. 

Go to your Auction Insights Report to see who your true auction competitors are. Note that if your Search Impression Share is less than 10%, you might have to skip this step and just guess who your competitors are. 

2. Next, spy on their ads. 

Once you have a list of competitor domains, head on over to the Google Ads Transparency Center, which I lovingly refer to as the Google Ads library. Type in your competitor domains one by one. See all ads, change the date frame to the last 30 days, and look at the ads they're running right now. 

3. And then step three, borrow the best bits.

You should be able to see pretty quickly why your competitors may have a better CTR than you. I recommend starting by asking yourself some of these questions: 

• What kind of language are they using in their ads?

• Which features or benefits are they highlighting?

• What calls to action are they using?

• How are they talking about their own business?

• How are they differentiating themselves?

• Which assets and formats are they leveraging?

• What are they not doing a good job at?

But please don't copy your competitors. Instead, put yourself in your target customer's shoes. Take note of the things you think your competitors are doing well and bring those takeaways back to your own ad text creation. 

Something else I'll often recommend is looking up people in the same business as you in a different area or different country. So people who are not actually your competitors but do what you do somewhere else. That can also be a great source of inspiration from the Google Ads library. 

For example, on one recent Google Ads coaching call, here were a few of the observations we had about the competitor ads. 

First, we noticed that competitors had headlines like "call now for a free quote" and "limited time offer," emphasizing free and a sense of urgency. My client's ads just said "call us." So, you can see how "call now for a free quote" is much more appealing than "call us" or "call now."

Next, highlighting a key user benefit. Almost all the competitors mentioned saving energy. "Save on your energy bill." "Save the environment." My client had not been using any of that language even though that was true for them as well. 

And then third, we noticed that competitors were using a lot of different assets like price assets and promotion assets. This was not an e-commerce business, so my client had never considered that, but these absolutely can still be relevant for service-based businesses, and so we looked into adding that. 

These are just a few of the many opportunities that we found to improve the ad text and add additional assets, which should help increase click-through rate and therefore expected click-through rate and therefore increase Quality Score and therefore decrease CPCs. Whew!

I hope this framework provides you with a clear, actionable path to improving your expected CTR and by extension your overall Quality Score and campaign performance. 

Now, I'd like to show you a great example I saw from another Google Ads expert on LinkedIn of how they were able to improve their clients Quality Score and in turn decrease costs and therefore achieve a better cost per lead. Here's what Kuda Chinara has to say, and I've included a link to this post in the episode description. 

Kuda took over a Google Ads account where the Quality Score was stuck below five, which is not too good and not too bad, sort of average. You know, it makes everything a little bit more expensive. So, what he looked at was these three things: How well the ad matches the keyword (ad relevance), how likely people are to click it (expected CTR), and whether the landing page lives up to the ad (landing page experience). 

Kuda went one step further than I usually do and weighted this data by impressions and found that in this case, expected CTR was the main problem. That's usually the case, by the way. And while there were other issues, too, you can't fix everything all at once. So Kuda decided not just to write better ads, that's part of it, but to genuinely improve the user experience.

So what he says is, “The existing ads described what the product was rather than what it did for the buyer. So I wrote a set of challenger ads to run against them and let performance pick the winner.” 

This is what I call talking about features rather than benefits. Features are about you. Benefits are about the user. So a really great insight there. 

Kuda also shares how he made landing page improvements and then the honest part that it did not work right away. Quality Score is a lagging signal. So for over a month, his own weekly check-ins kept showing no real change. And this can be discouraging. But even though the Quality Score columns themselves weren't changing, Kuda says the early indicators were heading the right way. Actual CTR on the new ads and conversion rate on the new pages were moving up. So, he stayed the course rather than abandoning this test.

Eventually, it moved exactly where we would expect it would. I'll fast forward to the end of Kuda's story where, across the account, the impression-weighted Quality Score went from the mid-5s to 6. That may sound small, but the real life impact of that is that the cost per lead is now at a record low of £37, down from £49 on the same monthly budget. That means the same spend with way more leads achieved through a focus on quality improvements. 

Again, I'll link to Kuda's excellent post in the episode description so you can check out the full details for yourself. 

For more details about Quality Score, I recommend checking out Episode 107 of this podcast. I'll link that in the episode description. 

And if you'd like my help improving the quality of your ads, you can book a call with me at jyll.ca. 

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