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Is quality score optimization still relevant?
I’ve always considered improving quality score to be important, especially based on the good ‘ol CPC discount chart. Has anyone seen success from optimizing towards higher quality score recently (tailoring ad copy, landing page testing, etc)? Any reduction in CPC or CPA, or increase in impression share?
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1 Reply
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It’s absolutely still relevant. It gives you a good direction on what can be improved and the higher the quality score the more the chances of winning more auctions.
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Of course, it still improves your cpc, therefore it can improve your cost per lead or acquisition.
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Yes and yes. More yeses.
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People think that quality score is a metric that impacts the auction. It isn’t. Google even state this on their page about quality score.
And yet people continue to fixate on quality score.
It’s a reasonable indicator for understanding how high you can expect your CPC to be based on keyword niche. That’s about it.
The number of agencies I still see pitching to clients about quality score, as if they can actually do something about it and actually improve CPCs is astonishing.
It is, in my opinion, as useless a metric as optimization score.
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It’s not as useful and important as it used to be in my opinion.
It is something you can be mindful of but it comes really down the list of things you need to optimise for. There are other important things you could be doing with your time. But yeah once everything else it sorted, could look at QS too.
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Yes! Very much important. The first is that paying more money will never win Google’s ad bidding. Ads need to be well optimized to get good results from ads. Google gives a quality score on how optimized the ad is. Total score is 100. The higher the score achieved by optimizing the ad, the more likely it is to win the bidding. The winner’s ad will appear on the Google Top Absolute page.
Let’s say you and me the two of you do Google ads for restudent. Your daily budget is $100 and my daily budget is $20. Your ad optimized score is 50 and my ad optimized score is 90. Here Google must show my ad on the top absolute page. Even my ad will outperform your ad. At the end of the day my business will definitely be better than yours.
I hope you understand. Many clients from different countries come to me. Most of them have high ad budgets but very low optimized scores. I optimize and increase the score. Finally their ads perform much better. If you have any questions or need help, feel free to DM me.
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It seems to me that it is still someway important.
The problem with the quality score is that sometimes it’s really hard to figure out how to improve it. It has happened to me several times that I have a low quality score especially for the landing page but I have no idea what the problem was with my landing page.In many cases it seemed to me to be just a random evaluation by the Google algorithm.
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Working to improve the combination of factors that improve quality score is always beneficial. But with RSAs, more broad match keywords in accounts, and automated bidding, this is not as granular as it used to be.
And as it has always been, quality score needs to take a backseat to conversion performance. If you have a few keywords sitting at 1 you can’t seem to improve, but they drive huge results, so be it.
Importantly, quality scores are relative to you and your competition. Many advertisers sit adjacent to a large vertical, and as such can expect lower quality scores due to lower vertical relevance. This sometimes just can’t be helped.
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It’s definitely important. Especially if you want to get lower bids and win more auctions. Google essentially subsidizes your ads if you become more relevant
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Quality score is important. It directly impacts the cost of your bidding. The factors that make up your quality score are important for good UX.
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this is my own experience. I do lead for something related to auto loan. At first I got $2 per click with 3/10 quality score. ($2-8 is normal for this kind of work, but at that time I didnt know, and get pissed over it)
and then I try to set maximum click to 0.06, thinking that maybe google will eat more of my budget if I dont set maximum. But my account dont spend at all.
Later i read that quality score play an important role in cpc, I get ocd to get higher quality score. Eventually I get my page to 10/10 quality score, and my account was spending. I got 0.06-0.12 per click.
The product cost is $3000, I spend $200 to get 40 leads and one conversion.
But i see that google always throw unrelated terms to my adgroup, those keyword always get 6/10 quality score. but still 0.06 per click. but no action from those keywords.
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I don’t look at the score all that much but I absolutely do everything possible when creating an ad to improve my chances of getting an excellent quality score. Basically just hitting “excellent” when creating an ad, filling out every single field/asset possible, and ensuring I’m not getting too broad with a campaign topic so as to keep CTR and conversion in a good spot.
Haven’t done enough LP testing but on my list.
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Yes it is. Since Google doesn’t show us our ad rank QS is what we have to go by. I’m running a campaign now where the QS was 3. I optimized the landing page to improve LP relevance and QS and my cost per click and cost per conversion dropped by almost 40%.
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The Quality Score can be influenced by three main factors:
• The Expected TR of the ad: each time the ad is eligible to be displayed on the search engine result page, an algorithm predicts the probability that your ad will be clicked compared to another advertiser’s ad.
• The Ad relevance to the query: for the Google Ads system, the goal is to align what the user is looking for with the advertisement that is shown to him and the website to which the user will be redirected.
• The landing page experience: Does your landing page answer the initial question that was expressed by the user in his request? Is it well connected to your ad (for example, if your ad features a 20% discount, is it also shown on your landing page)? Technical factors will also be considered such as loading time or compatibility with mobile devices. -
Not as much as it used to be.
Google is taking away a lot of control by moving towards broad match, automated bidding so the impact of QS has decreased.
QS is the second thing to look at, if the performance is good ignore a bad QS but not vice versa. Have had many ads where the QS is poor but the performance beats ads with higher QS
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