Google Ads Quality Score
Your Google Ads quality score will directly impact your ad costs and visibility, and therefore ROI, which makes it an extraordinarily important metric to pay attention to if you're managing a real estate PPC campaign.
Here at REW, we take care of quality score for all our clients, letting them focus their time and energy on real estate. However, if you're tackling your own campaigns, this is what you need to know about Google's quality scores:
What is Quality Score?
Every ad in Google Ads is given a quality score, and this quality score directly reflects how good Google thinks your ads are. Google created quality score to help improve the user experience, by ensuring that advertisers created ads that are likely to be of interest to the user.
For that reason, your PPC quality score is made up of two parts:
- Relevance
- Ad Quality
Relevance is determined by the query that's being targetted, and it's an indicator of how relevant your ad is to the search term. Ads that are relevant to the search will reflect what the user was searching for.
Ad Quality reflects the type of user experience you provide and factors in how well your ads are written, the landing page the ads drive traffic to, and how well people interact with your ads.
Why does Quality Score matter?
Your quality score is going to directly impact the ROI you see from your PPC campaign. Google uses quality score to reward advertisers who build good campaigns, and they do this by providing higher ad placements and lower costs.
In theory, two advertisers could create and bid on the exact same ad, but the person with the higher quality score is going to get better placements and lower costs.
How is Google Quality Score calculated?
Now that we know the basics of what your quality score reflects, let's talk about how it's calculated. The exact recipe for quality score is a secret, but we do know your quality score is going to be impacted by a number of individual factors, including:
- Ad text quality
- Landing page quality
- Click-through rates (CTR)
- Relevancy of keywords to their overall ad group
- Account reputation & performance
How do I improve my quality score?
Now that we know that quality score is comprised of relevance and ad quality, it logically follows that we improve our quality score by improving those two factors. Here's a few tips to ensure your campaigns are on the right track:
1. Choose relevant keywords. Often, the best keywords are the ones that make the most sense. If you want to target people searching for "San Francisco real estate", create campaigns around keywords that are similar.
2. Create smaller ad groups. By segmenting your lists into different keyword groups, you'll be able to develop ads that are more relevant and specific. For example, you can create different keyword groups based on location, buyer vs. seller keywords, and so forth.
3. Refine your ad copy. Once you fully optimize your ad copy, you'll still want to try several variations of the same ad to see which has the best quality score.
4. Develop strategic landing pages. Having a high quality landing pages will play a direct role in your Quality Score. Ensure your landing page results match the ad group it's being used for. For example, an ad that targets the Bay Area in San Francisco should link directly to a landing page for the Bay Area, complete with real estate listings and at least one paragraph of information.
Where else will I see Quality Score?
If you're serious about online advertising on any platform, pay attention to the tips outlined above. While this post focuses specifically on Google Ads campaigns, it's not the only platform that uses quality scoring to influence results.
Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all use some form of quality scoring in their advertising platforms.