Advertisers are obsessed with quality score.
And with good reason. A higher quality score leads to bigger profits.
The higher your quality score, the less you have to pay to get your ad shown high and clicked on.
The less you pay for those clicks, the larger your profits.
Ad rank determines whose ad shows highest. The higher your ad rank, the higher and more often your ad shows. I think of ad rank as quality score x bid (plus some other stuff). The higher your quality score, the less your bid needs to be. So naturally, advertisers want a higher quality score.
This often leads to an unrelenting focus (read: distraction) on quality score. There’s data around quality score so advertisers focus on improving those metrics: expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. They optimize those metrics to try and optimize for quality score.Good luck with that.
Read Google’s own language on this, “Quality Score is not a key performance indicator and should not be optimized or aggregated with the rest of your data.”I listen to Google.
I don’t optimize for quality score. Instead, I optimize for user experience. User experience is the secret to quality score.
What does Google want?
Google wants users to click on ads just like they click on organic listings.
What will make users click on ads sustainably and over the long run?
Users will click on ads if they trust that those ads will give them what they’re searching for and help them solve their problems just like the way organic listings do.
How do you do that?
The answer is mindset. Having the customer experience mindset is the secret to Google Ads.
You want a seamless line of relevance.
From the moment the user has a problem pop into their head, to their search on their keyboard or their phone, to them seeing your ad and clicking on it, to them seeing your landing page, and to the response they get once they call you or complete a lead form, you want a perfect user experience and a seamless line of relevance.
Let’s look at the example of an injury attorney.
Jessica gets into a car accident and is injured.
Jessica’s insurance company doesn’t seem that helpful and she thinks, “This is very stressful, I think I need a lawyer.”
Jessica Google’s “personal injury lawyer near me.”
Your ad pops up.
It says “Looking for an attorney to help you after a car accident? Call us today.”
Jessica clicks on the ad.
Jessica sees a picture of a car accident and a picture of an attorney on the landing page.And a big, fat phone number that makes it easy for her to know how to contact the attorney.
Jessica dials the number that she sees.
Jessica is answered by a helpful representative of the law firm.
Jessica becomes a client and gets her problem solved.
What did Jessica not do?
Jessica did not click the back button and go back to Google.
This is the secret to quality score and the definition of a good user experience. This is the mindset I use to “optimize” for quality score.
What can I do with my keywords, my ads, my landing pages, and my client’s lead response process to make it as unlikely as possible that the user will click the back button and need to go back to Google.
Call it the “Jessica approach to quality score.” What can I do to make Jessica not have to click the back button and go back to her Google search?
Check out the 49:59 mark of this video. A former Google employee explains Google’s preference for ads that perform better than organic search results and how they measure for that ad quality, with the measurement being based on how likely it was that the user did not go back to Google.
You do that, you make your keyword selection, your ad, your landing page, and your lead response process so good that the user doesn’t want to click back to Google; you’ll find yourself rewarded with quality score and ad rank success, which acts like rocket fuel to take the performance of your Google Ads campaign to a place so good you can’t even image it.
That’s how I do it.
That’s how I solve for quality score.
I use the Jessica approach to quality score.
