Quality Score can halve your cost per click or double it. Here's how to get it working in your favour.
Quality Score is Google's rating of the overall quality and relevance of your keywords, ads, and landing pages. It's scored from 1 to 10, and it directly affects how much you pay per click and where your ads appear. A Quality Score of 8 or above can reduce your cost per click by up to 50% compared to a score of 5.
The three components of Quality Score are: expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Google wants to show users ads that are genuinely useful, so it rewards advertisers who create tightly themed campaigns where the keyword, ad copy, and landing page all align around the same topic.
To improve your Quality Score, organise your campaigns into tightly themed ad groups. Don't put 'emergency plumber', 'boiler installation', and 'bathroom fitting' in the same ad group. Each service should have its own ad group with specific ads and a dedicated landing page. This alignment is what Google rewards.
Landing page experience is often the weakest link. Your landing page needs to load quickly, be mobile-friendly, contain the keywords from your ad group naturally in its content, and provide a clear path to conversion. A page that ticks all these boxes will push your Quality Score up and your costs down.