For many years, PPC advertising companies and digital marketers have used Google’s Quality Score to know how relevant a keyword has been based on data from past ad auctions. Google basically assigns each of your keywords a quality score, which lets you know how well your ads match your keywords.
In this day and age, some marketers are wondering if the Quality Score is still relevant. While many still use it, it is considered one of Google Ads’ most elusive performance metrics. Lately, however, we haven’t heard much on this metric as Google moves into more automation with their algorithms. So, the question is, does the Quality Score no longer matter? Let’s find out.
What is Quality Score?
Google’s Quality Score is a grading system used to decide whether an ad is good enough to be shown in the sponsored space of the search results. It also shows the ad’s position and how much to charge for each click. Now, there are three components to the Quality Score assigned at the keyword level, which are:
- Ad Relevance – This examines how closely your ad matches the search query. It’s all about using the most relevant and searchable keywords so Google can find them in your ad copy.
- Expected Click-Through Rate (ECTR) – This is Google’s determination of how likely your ad will be clicked on based on things like the query’s intent matching to your ad and your historical CTR data. There’s very little control here since it’s all up to Google’s prediction.
- Landing Page Experience – This is all about how user-friendly your website is and how relevant your landing page is to the user. There’s a lot of factors that Google considers here, like load times, keywords, relevance, and more.
By looking at all these factors, Google gives you a score between one to ten (ten being the highest) to get your Quality Score. This number then impacts your performance and your ad rank.
Does Google Ads Quality Score Still Matter in 2021?
In its essence, the Quality Score isn’t very actionable, and you have very little control over it. Most of the time, it puts you at the mercy of Google’s algorithmic judgment. Even if you try so hard to make sense of it, Google doesn’t actually give pay-per-click agencies and marketers a clear explanation as to what’s giving ads a low Quality Score.
Quality Score is also only applicable to standard search campaigns. With all of Google’s development over the years, search campaigns are only small fish in a big sea of other media-heavy campaign types like display or video.
Final Thoughts
Granted, Quality Score remains to be one of the reasons why advertisers make so much effort in making great ads. It’s also a useful guidepost to make sure advertisers create ads that matched the users’ intent. But the uncertainty and vagueness of the Quality Score’s formula remain to be the one factor that makes people question its relevance. It’s something that many people in the industry are yet to understand fully.
NESMA Group is a design and brand marketing agency that helps business owners get the exposure they need to gain more customers. Through our online advertising services, we make it possible for your business to reach your customers easily. Whether you need website development, content marketing, SEO, email marketing, or PPC advertising services, our team is here to help. Contact us today to get started!