The likelihood that the ad will be clicked

Quality Score can be a valuable tool in identifying ways to improve your ads, keywords, and landing pages. You can think of Quality Score as a general indicator of which areas to focus on to improve ad quality, rather than a score to be optimized.

This article guides you through different ways to use your Quality Score to improve your performance.

1. Review your Quality Score components

For specific insights on where to make improvements, dive deeper into the 3 components of Quality Score:

• Expected clickthrough rate: The likelihood that your ad will be clicked when shown.
• Ad relevance: How closely your ad matches the intent behind a user's search.
• Landing page experience: How relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click your ad.

These components can help you see whether to update your ad text, keyword selection, or landing page content. You’ll see a status of “Below average,” “Average,” and “Above average” for each component to give you a sense of which areas might need improvement. 

The key point is: give your users what they’re looking for and good performance should follow. Focus on your long-term performance goals and look for ways to reach them by improving your user experience, using Quality Score as a diagnostic tool. 

2. Make ads more relevant to keywords

Ad relevance shows you how relevant your ads are to the keywords they’re targeting. 

If your Ad relevance has a status of “Below average” or “Average,” try these best practices:

• Match the language of your ad text more directly to user search terms.
• Look for ad groups with many different keywords that can’t be easily addressed by the same ad. Split these ad groups into multiple ad groups that better match to the user’s searches.
• Try grouping your keywords into themes to increase relevance. These themes can be based on your products, services, or other categories. For example, if you sell rings, you can have a group of keywords for "engagement rings" and another group of keywords for "wedding bands."

Note that moving an ad group with the same ads and keywords to another campaign or account does not impact your ad quality. 

3. Try to improve your clickthrough rate (CTR)

Expected clickthrough rate indicates how likely people are to click your ad. 

If your Exp. CTR has a status of “Below average” or “Average,” try these best practices:

• Edit your ad text to make your offer more compelling to your target audience.
• Ensure the details in your ad match the intent of your keywords.
• Highlight a unique benefit of your product or service, such as free shipping.
• Experiment with different calls to action that connect closely with your landing page.
• Create compelling calls to action with words like “Buy, Sell, Order, Browse, Find, Sign up, Try, Get a Quote.”
• Be more specific in your ad text.

There may be times when a more specific ad leads to lower CTRs, but higher conversion rates. Look for the balance that leads to the best possible performance for your goals.

For example, let’s say you sell luxury dress shoes. 

Adding a phrase to your ad like “free bow tie with order” may attract shoppers looking for deals. On the other hand, phrases like “fine craftsmanship” or “custom Italian design” may engage people looking for a quality brand. 

The bargain message may get you more clicks, but may not result in as many loyal customers over the long term.

4. Consider updating your landing page

Bringing people to your site is only one part of online marketing. It’s important to provide visitors with an excellent experience on your website.

If your Landing page exp. has a status of “Below average” or “Average,” try these best practices:

• Give people what they’re looking for. If someone searches for “flannel shirts” and clicks your ad for “flannel shirts,” the landing page they go to should feature your flannel inventory.
• Keep messaging consistent from ad to landing page. Make sure the page follows through on the ad’s offer or call to action. Even if you have no control over your site, you can still experiment to find the most useful existing pages.
• Try using conversion rate as a proxy for good landing page experience. It doesn't impact your landing page status, but it can be a good way for you to measure and optimize.
• Make your website mobile friendly. Ease of navigation is something users value even more on mobile websites. You can use the Mobile-Friendly Test to see how well your landing page works on mobile devices. 
• Improve loading speed. The speed at which your page loads can be the difference between someone bouncing or buying.

Keep in mind, the word-for-word phrase from a search term doesn’t need to be on your landing page. 

A search for “South Chicago Chihuahua-friendly budget hotels” doesn’t need to lead to a landing page with the headline “South Chicago Chihuahua-friendly budget hotels.” Instead focus on creating great experiences that deliver what the user is looking for.

5. Use Quality Score with other metrics

Look at other metrics in your account, like clickthrough rate, conversion rate, and site engagement. They’re connected to your performance and can help as you look for specific areas to improve.

As you review your performance, you can use Quality Score as a filter to tell you where to focus your efforts:

• Look through your high-performing keywords and use Quality Score to identify which ones may do even better with changes to your ads and landing pages.
• Use low Quality Scores and component status to find weaker trends for ad relevance, clickthrough rate, and landing page experience that might exist across your account, and set long-term plans for improvement.

Related links

• About Quality Score
• 9 things to know about ad quality

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