What is Google Ads relevance, and how to improve it?

Google Ads is an excellent way to drive traffic to your website, generate MQLs, and increase sales and revenue. However, Google Ads can also be a very expensive advertising channel if you do not know what you are doing.

The basic idea is that you bid on relevant keywords and compete with other businesses to get a spot on the top of search engine results pages.

However, the key thing to understand here is that money isn’t the only factor that plays a role in the bidding process. Ad relevance is an equally important factor.

Moreover, if your ad is highly relevant, you will be paying less money than your competitors. That’s why improving Google Ads relevance can be a major differentiator between a failed and a highly successful Google Ads campaign.

In this blog post, we will discuss more about Google Ads relevance and quality score, and what you can do to improve the quality score and, therefore, reduce the amount you pay for ads.

 

What is the quality score in Google Ads?

Here is how Google defined quality score:

“The Quality Score is Google’s rating of the overall user experience that your ads and landing pages provide when users search for your keyword(s). This is represented on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest.“

If you have an active Google Ads account with active campaigns, you can check your Quality Score by looking at the keywords report.

 

Three main components of the Quality Score

 

How Google defines the quality score is the next big question.  The good news is that Google has clearly highlighted the three main components of the Quality Score.

The three major components of the Quality Score are:

• Ad relevance
• Landing page experience
• Expected click-through rate or CTR

By improving one or all of these three factors, you can improve the overall quality score of your ad and reduce the amount you have to pay for each click.

 

How to improve Google Ads quality score

Let’s discuss how to improve Quality Score in Google Ads.  We will categorize the tips for each component.

 

1. How to improve Ad Relevance

As we mentioned earlier, ad relevance is an important factor in Google Ads. For instance, if you have a gardening website and you are showing your ads for keywords such as ‘how to play guitar’, the ad won’t be relevant.  

You will have to pay a lot more money than other more relevant ads, and your ads still likely won’t show because of how irrelevant it is.

To increase ad relevance:

• Make sure that your ads are built around a theme.
• Use relevant keywords in your ad — headline, body, and display path fields — to ensure relevance and consistency.
• Do not just copy and paste your ads from other campaigns without making important changes to make your ads relevant for this ad group.
• Make sure the ads match the searcher intent of the keywords.
• Divide your ads into multiple ad groups.  Then tailor customized, keyword-rich ads for each ad group.

 

2. How to improve the landing page experience

Having an excellent ad is just the start — not the end.

An ad only brings a potential customer to your website. After that, it is up to the landing page to convert a potential lead into a paying customer.

That’s why the landing page that receives traffic should offer a good experience. If the landing page experience is not good enough, it will affect conversions and the overall quality score.

To improve the landing page experience:

• Use the same keywords and phrases you used in the ad copy.
• Simplify the navigation experience
• Improve the landing page performance and loading speed. You can use free tools like Google PageSpeed Insights.
• Make sure the pages are mobile friendly.

 

3. How to improve the expected CTR

This one is more tricky to get right because this component refers to the expected CTR — not the actual CTR.

The expected CTR is estimated based on how a particular keyword performs in your Google Ads account vs. how it performs in other advertisers’ accounts.

To ensure a high expected CTR:

• Expand your negative keyword list and prevent irrelevant queries from triggering your ads.
• Make sure that the ad copy and the keywords are closely aligned.
• Make sure that each ad matches the keyword group it is for.
• Divide your ads into multiple, highly targeted ad groups.
• Pause or delete keywords and ads with extremely low expected CTR.

 

Conclusion

Improving ad quality score is extremely important for a successful Google Ads campaign. Use historical quality score data to monitor any improvements you make.