Google offers greater Transparency in the Factors that influence the Quality Score

The Quality Score (quality level) always a metric that obsessed Adwords users and until very recently the information we obtained about it was very poor.

Although it is known that the Quality Score is calculated in each of the searches where a keyword from our campaign triggers an ad, the only data we had until a couple of weeks ago was a numerical value from "1/10" to "10/10" representing the relevance of our keywords.

On the other hand, Google has clarified on many occasions that the most important factors that determine the Quality Score are CTR, Ad Relevance and Relevance of the landing page.

However, there was no way to determine which of these factors should be optimized in case of low quality problems.

This changed on April 24 when Google announced in the Adwords official blog that transparency on the Quality Score would be increased, so that we can better understand which factors in our campaigns should be optimized to obtain higher quality levels.

Currently when consulting the status of our keywords we see, apart from the traditional numbers from 1 to 10, a report of the performance of our keywords in the main factors that influence the Quality Score.

Example:

The performance of the Expected clickthrough rate (CTR), Ad relevance Y Landing page experience It is displayed on a relative scale that will determine whether our performance is below average, average, or above average compared to our competitors.

What does each of these factors mean?

Expected clickthrough rate: This factor tells us if the current CTR status of our ads compared to other advertisers bidding on a given keyword.

If our Expected Click-Through Rate is lower than average, it means that to improve our Quality Score we must test new variations of ads in order to obtain higher CTRs.

Ad relevance: An advertisement is considered relevant if it responds directly to the search made by the user.

To give an exaggerated example, if a user searches for “hotels in Buenos Aires” and our ad offers tennis rackets… I think we will all agree that the ad is not relevant to the search.

Sometimes an ad can also show a lower than average relevance even though its content is directly related to the user's search, in this case we must create ad groups with a lower number of keywords in them, with the aim of that the ads are as closely related as possible to user searches.

Landing page experience: Ideally the landing page should be clearly organized and easy to navigate while having useful and original content that responds to the user's search.

An underperforming landing page will typically need more content closely related to the user's specific search.

By examining our performance in each of these factors we can ensure that our quality levels will improve and we will obtain all the benefits that this implies 😉