Written by Juan Daniel Fuentes
A Quality Score is a score assigned to each advertisement in an advertising campaign on platforms such as Google AdWords (now Google Ads) to determine its quality. This score ranges from 1 to 10 and can be displayed within the ad groups, for each keyword. It is usually applied once the campaign has been running for some time and affects the position in which the ads are displayed on the results pages.
In the case of AdWords, it assigns an initial value of 6 for new ad group words, as it has no information to make an objective assessment. The platform requires at least one day to obtain sufficient data to update this rating. The Quality Score is based on 3 pieces of information to calculate the final score:
- Expected click-through rate: this is based on the ad’s click and impression history and compares it to competitors.
- The relevance of the ad: this is the degree of relevance of the ad text with respect to the search performed by the user.
- Landing page experience: refers to the quality of the user’s experience when visiting the target website.
These three data are evaluated individually and may be rated as:
- Below average: The rating is low compared to competing ads.
- Average: The rating is within the normal range with respect to competing ads.
- Above average: The rating is higher than most competing ads.
As a general rule, to obtain the highest Quality Score scores you must have “Above Average” quality levels, expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience.
Google and other search engines thus apply an algorithm similar to the one they use to order their natural results, favoring a better position to those ads of better quality, even if the maximum CPC for which they bid is lower than that of other advertisers. Thus, the maximum CPC is not the only factor that determines the position that our ad will occupy in the sponsored links block. Achieving a high quality position means that we will not need to bid for such a high cost per click to appear among the top positions.
On the other hand, it must be taken into account that the objective of a campaign is to achieve the maximum number of quality visits in exchange for the available investment. Increasing the bid to always occupy the first position will increase the cost of the campaign, so we will get less visits for the same money. Whether the visits come from the first or third payment result generally has no impact on the quality of that visit in terms of conversion, so the cheaper the visits, the higher the number and, at the same conversion rate, the higher the number of sales and the ROI of the campaign. This is why it is so important to obtain a high Quality Score and thus obtain the maximum number of visits for the available investment budget.
