How To Improve Low Quality Score Keywords

 

Quality Score is the metric we all love to fix – and with good reason. It reveals the health campaigns and keywords and shows what needs fixing easily. A low quality score is anything below 6/10.

 

However, AdWords Quality Score is misunderstood. Many advertisers don’t understand the role it plays in the account and for that reason, many don’t optimise it effectively.

 

Here are some common misconceptions:

 

1. It’s the most important keyword metric. Not true! Conversion metrics are the most important metrics
2. There’s an account quality score. Incorrect! It’s a keyword metric
3. Increasing bids will increase quality score. Unfortunately not! Many mistakenly believe that increasing bids will increase Click Through Rate (CTR) and therefore increase it.
4. Paused keywords will affect quality score. Again not true! It’s calculated at auction time and paused keywords will have their historic quality score

 

The reality is that quality score is like the warning lights in your car dashboard. It alerts you to potential problems in your account, but cannot fix them.

 

 

When you identify a problem, the next step is to fix any of the factors that are causing a low quality score.

 

Here are three main factors to your quality scores and how you can fix each of them to achieve high quality scores:

 

Update website & landing pages
Landing page experience is an important factor for your quality scores. It reveals how engaged visitors are when on your website and helps you to optimise for quality traffic.

 

If visitors reach the page and bounce, then it shows they’re not finding what they’re looking for.

 

So try a different landing page. Or maybe look at updating the content and call to action on the page. And avoid sending visitors to the homepage; instead send them to the exact page where the product or service they’ve searched for can be found.

 

Make Ads Relevant
Your Ads should be targeted to visitors searches. That will help achieve a high Click Through Rate (CTR) and will boost your quality scores.

 

Relevant ads always perform well. They have all the key benefits that a searcher would be interested in and they have a unique selling point that differentiate from competitors’.

 

So avoid talking about your business and product features. Don’t talk about how long you’ve been in business and how you are the best in the industry. Instead, show how your products or services can benefit the prospect.

 

And ensure you use as much of the character space available:

 

Headline 1 – 30 characters
Headline 2 – 30 characters
Description – 80 characters
Path 1 – 15 characters
Path 2 – 15 characters

 

Improve Click Through Rate
Expected CTR is one of the main quality score factors. It reveals how targeted your ads are to people’s searches and the higher the CTR the more targeted they are.

 

Also, Ads that occupy the top positions will have high CTRs. They are more visible and when they appear above the Organic Search listings, searchers are more likely to click.

 

However a low Ad Rank doesn’t affect Quality Scores. While it’s great to have your ads appearing in the top position, doing so doesn’t increase the expected Click Through rate of your ads. It’s normalised for the actual position on the page. The top ads are expected to receive more clicks than lower ranked ads and that is factored in to the calculation of expected CTR.

 

So you don’t need to bid for higher positions to increase your Quality Scores.

 

Conclusion
Follow the tips above if you have low quality scores between 1/10 – 5/10. Doing this will help to improve performance in the long run and increase Ad Rank for lower cost.