How to Get 10/10 Quality Scores

 

Quality Score (QS) is a metric that reveals the health of your keywords. It’s assigned to every keyword that has had significant traffic volumes – usually hundreds of impressions and clicks.

 

Having keywords with 10/10 quality scores is a sign of a well managed campaign. This shows that Ads are targeted to people’s searches and are closely related to the keywords in the search campaign.

 

Quality Scores are like the dashboard in your car. The purpose of the dashboard is to alert you to any problem with the engine, tires, lights or anything else related to your car. It won’t fix the problem; but will reveal what needs to be fixed.

 

So quality score is just an indicator. It’s not the most important metric in your account, however it alerts you to any potential problems and what you can do about them.

 

 

There are three main factors that affect your Quality Scores. And these can each have one of three statuses: Below Average, Average and Above Average. Improving these factors and bringing them all up to “Above Average” status will help you achieve 10/10 Quality Scores.

 

Here are some tips on how to do this:

 

Improve Expected Click Through Rate (CTR)
Expected CTR is a prediction of what the CTR will be based on past performance, Search term, location, device used and other factors. So it’s important that you create targeted ads for your keywords.

 

For an Expected CTR of Below Average or Average you should look at the various factors to improve it.

 

Improving the CTR metric will bring your keywords closer to 10/10. And that’s mainly because CTR is an important Quality Score factor.

 

A number of ways to improve CTR include:

⁃ remove poor performing search terms
⁃ Add negative keywords
⁃ Update Text Ads based on performance
⁃ Create tightly themed ad groups
⁃ Allow AdWords to automatically show the best performing Ads

 

Improve Ad Relevance 
Ad relevance is one of the most important Quality Score factors. It’s an indication of how targeted your Ads are to a visitors search term.

 

One way to make your ads relevant is by including the keyword in the Ad. People are more likely to click through when they see the words they’ve used in the Ad they see. They’ll perceive your ads as being relevant.

 

Also, use Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) in the headline of your ad. DKI is a syntax that’s used to update the Ads dynamically by adding the keyword that has been used. This is an example of DKI:

 

{KeyWord:Google AdWords Specialist}

 

The keyword “Google AdWords Specialist” is the default text and this is changed to include the keyword that the searcher has used to find your Ad.

 

This makes adding keywords in the Ad a lot easier, especially if you have 10 or more keywords in an ad group.

 

Improve Landing Page Experience
It’s not enough that your Ads are relevant to searches. The visitor experience on the page should be great and visitors should find what they’re looking for within one click, and it should be of the highest quality.

 

Your pages should also include your main keywords in the text. That helps with conversions as people find what they’ve searched for. They will then click one of your calls to action and make a purchase or signup or whatever other action you require.

 

Bounce rate also affects landing page experience factors. People who reach your landing page and leave without viewing other pages are not engaged. So if someone views one page and leaves, that is a 100% bounce rate. You should aim for a bounce rate lower than 50% for all your Ad campaigns.

 

Add Ad Extensions
Add extensions help your Ads stand out in the auction results. They appear under the normal text ads and highlight other areas of your business. Some important ad extensions to add are sitelinks, callouts and call extensions.

 

By adding these, your ads become more relevant to searchers. They’re therefore more likely to find what they want and click through to your website.

 

This helps to boost factors such as Ad relevance and Expected CTR and therefore improves your Quality Scores.

 

Try to add as many ad extensions as possible. That includes location extensions, more callouts, price extensions, all applicable Sitelinks and others.

 

Remove Low Performing Search Terms
Search terms with low CTRs usually underperform for other metrics like conversion rate. These searches lower your quality scores and prevent your campaigns from reaching their potential.

 

Conclusion
Getting 10/10 quality scores for your keywords is possible. You just have to follow a process of setting up and managing campaigns that ensures Ads are targeted, search terms are relevant, landing pages are optimised and Ad Extensions have been added.