Google Ads Quality Score Optimization Steps

To increase keywords quality score means working on its three components: ad relevance, landing page experience and expected CTR. A better quality score may lead to a higher Ad Rank in the auctions without changing your bid, so you can now have a lower CPC (or higher in case you improve your avg. position).

How do we improve ad relevance?

1. Improve your ads

I know it’s obvious, but still, you never say it enough: adjust your copies and TEST, TEST, TEST!

Check your ad text separate elements as the headlines, CTA and visible URL. Check if there is correlation with keywords in the ad group in order to assure the highest ad relevance. Always have 2-3 version of your ad running, and investigate on the performance.

2. Find new niches

Focus on creating and identifying different niches among your current keywords, as well as looking into the search term report. This will allow splitting keywords into different ad groups and improve the ad relevance.

It’s important to understand that keywords have to be split both per semantic/product and per search intent.

Let’s say we sell mobile phones on our website and we see these two queries in our search term report that have been activated by our keyword +mobile +phone :

• “what’s the best mobile phone”
• “buy mobile phone”

Although they both contain mobile phone, the intent of the search is quite different. While “what’s the best mobile phone” is a search made by someone who’s still in the commercial investigation process, the user searching for “buy mobile phone” already knows what he wants, and we can say the search has a transactional intent.

Once identified these potential new keywords with different search intents we can put them in two different ad groups in order to adjust the ad text for each of them getting higher ad relevance.

How do we improve expected CTR?

1. Improve your ads

I have to recall what just said above. Better ads, more catchy ads, and above all more relevant ads will improve your CTR. No mystery here, so let’s move the following point which is less obvious .

2. Find negative keywords

Not all searches are pertinent to our business or to the aim of the account, let’s think about searches of product that we currently don’t offer or searches made by current customers who wants to log in. If on one side we’re wasting budget on those searches, they are also negatively impacting on ad performance since it won’t be relevant to the search query and the average CTR will be lower.

Let’s say we are a mobile company and our keyword is +mobile +contract which has a 8% average CTR. When we go through our search term report and see:

Search Term	Impressions	Clicks	CTR
“cancel mobile contract”	100	1	1%

We can easily detect, that we should add “cancel” as a negative keyword which is negatively impacting our average CTR.

Don’t miss some extra tips on negativization.

How do we improve landing page experience?

1. Check page speed

Page speed matters, and we know it, and it is more and more important for mobile visitors that the page doesn’t take more than 1 second to load. So, don’t forget to check page speed for both mobile and desktop.

2. Irrelevant landing page

The worst it can happen is having great ads, awesome CTR and with no working landing page or a not relevant landing page. I’ve seen several cases where the ad group was about a product A while the landing went either to the home or the another product.

I hope these simple steps help you out with your quality score, feel free to share your own experience!