This is part 2 of a 4-part blog series on search engine marketing (SEM). This blog will go over the ins and outs of how quality score works in SEM. You can read any of the other 3 blogs by clicking any of the links below!
- Part 1: Keyword, CPC, CTR, and More: Your 101 Guide to Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Part 3: SEM 101 (Part 3): Branded and High-Intent Keyword Campaigns
- Part 4: SEM 101 Part 4: Low-Intent and Competitor Keyword Campaigns
As marketers that use search engine marketing tools daily, one of the key factors that we consider is something called a “Quality Score.”
What is Quality Score, why should I care about it, and how does it work? Let’s deep dive into one of the most important statistics that anyone looking to create search engine campaigns should know about.
What is a Quality Score?
Search engines use Quality Score to determine if your page is relevant to the viewer. It takes into consideration a few metrics such as landing page experience, ad relevance, and expected clickthrough rate (CTR).
What is the benefit of a high Quality Score?
The Quality Score of your advertisement directly affects the amount of money you need to spend to compete with your competitors on specific keywords. A high score is the secret ingredient to spending less advertising dollars against your competitors and still earning that top page and top rank on search engines.
Conversely, Quality Score can work against you. With a low score, you may need to spend more money to simply compete with your competitor. The more realistic outcome, however, is that your ad retains a lower rank position. It’s in every business’ best interest to improve their ad campaign’s Quality Score as best as possible.
How do I improve my Quality Score?
Building search engine advertisement campaigns requires just as much—if not more—thought than an organic SEO page. Thankfully, with the tools at your disposal like fine-tuning your audience targeting or keyword research tools, building an effective ad with enticing copy is significantly easier to test what works and what doesn’t.
Your advertisement may generate a lot of traffic, but does your website retain prospects and, more importantly, convert them into customers? This is where a landing page comes in.
A landing page is the page your advertisement links to. Once a customer clicks onto your website, it’s up to your website to convert them into a paying customer. However, a landing page needs to create trust and align with your customer’s intent in order to be effective. A positive visitor experience directly correlates with your advertisement’s overall Quality Score. The more relevant you make your landing page to your customer, the better the customer’s experience will be, resulting in a higher score for your ad. A lot of companies create an entirely new web page specifically for each ad to maximize their Quality Score, resulting in one or even several pages being created for just one product or service.
However, no ad campaign is perfect, and its Quality Score can’t be either. Achieving the holy grail of 10/10 is a significant but difficult feat—no matter how well you curate your copy or build specific keywords for a landing page. In fact, depending on the goal of your campaign and intent of your ad, achieving a 7 or 8 is not possible and could even be lower than 5.
In part 3 of our blog, we’ll be covering what the four over-arching keyword intents are and what a good Quality Score for each one would be.
Need some help with your SEM campaign?
Looking for assistance with your SEM paid campaign? Wingman Direct Marketing (WMDM) has your back! WMDM is your Calgary search engine marketing experts when you need to supplement your current marketing efforts. Book a Wingman today to discuss how we can help you!