What is Quality Score?

What is Quality Score? Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. Today, we're talking about my favorite mystery metric, quality Score. And really, quality Score is mostly specific to Google Ads, but I also think that using Quality Score as a target or as an inspiration is a really good idea when you're creating content, for not only Google Ads, but really any type of content. And I like it because, in a lot of ways, Google and advertisers like us. We have the same goal we want to provide good content to users and we want to make money, and it does sometimes feel like we're fighting with Google, but our core goals are really aligned.

And at this point, you might be thinking well, I've heard of Quality Score, but what exactly is it and why should I care about this? And, of course, that is what today's episode is all about, and I'll just tease this up front. You should care about Quality Score because it will give you a discount on Google Ads and I'll tell you how that works later. Because Quality Score, though it's a Google's name for a fundamental metric that's really used by a lot of search engines like Google and Bing and probably all of the others, in some way or another to evaluate the quality and relevance of your PPC ads and, of course, we're primarily talking about Google Ads again here. But this kind of relevance rating of your content, of your ads, of your keywords, this kind of relevance rating is something you're going to see throughout the world of online advertising and content. But on Google, quality Score is a metric that's on our keywords that ranges from one to 10. You'll have a number from one to 10. 10 is the best, and it plays a really pivotal role in determining how your ads perform and how much you actually pay for each click. Again, we'll get to that in a second, so if you're wondering why you should care, again, that's your answer. Think, though, of Quality Score as a measure of your keywords, overall health, but think of it as a measure of health through the lens of relevancy, because Quality Score is influenced by a bunch of key factors Well, really three and we need to understand what elements make up Quality Score if we're going to really master it.

And Google does say that there are officially three components in Quality Score, but on their FAQ page, they also have some other factors that come into play here. I've linked that FAQ page in the show notes, but we're not going to go into all the detail on the other components, but component number one or factor number one is your click-through rate or CTR. Ctr is that ratio of clicks your ad receives to the number of times it's shown. We've talked about this before. We're going to talk about it again. A higher CTR is good. It indicates that your ad is relevant, it's engaging to users. But a low CTR is not good and it's a signal to Google that your ad is probably not a good match for the keywords that you're targeting. If people are seeing your ad but not clicking on it, then it's probably not in Google's best interest to give you a low price on ad space. So how do we fix this? We're not going to go too deep on this because we have had and will have more episodes on this, but the key things that I see law firms missing on that result in low click-through rates are number one, they have poor organization or grouping of keywords in their ad groups and number two, they have very generic ads that don't really highlight any of their search terms or their services. And again, we'll have more on that in a future episode.

But factor or component number two is your ad relevance. An ad relevance assesses how closely your ad copy and keywords align with the user's search query and their intent, so to speak. While click-through rate is kind of a real world test of this relevance, google is also constantly analyzing your landing pages, your ad text, your keywords and all of the historical data on your account, and they're comparing all of this against their infinite library of data points to determine if what you're saying is really the best thing to offer to their users. And this part of quality score is a little bit of a black box, but we know that the organization and ad text tweaks I mentioned before work really well to boost our relevancy. If we can specifically shout out our search terms in our ads, either through static text or dynamic keyword insertion, or DKI, data shows that we significantly increase relevance, we reduce costs and all that other good stuff.

Factor number three, though, is landing page quality, and Google actually calls this landing page experience, but that always just feels a little new agey to me, so I went with landing page quality, since we're talking about quality score after all, and this one's pretty simple in concept, but it's really tough to execute. Actually, a well-designed landing page is essential, and it should be user-friendly, it should load quickly and it should offer really valuable content. And that content needs to be relevant to the ads and the keywords that are going to provide traffic to that page, because you need to remember that it's not just about getting users to click on your ad. It's also about providing this seamless, informative post-click experience that is going to generate or get someone closer to becoming a sale or a lead. The general rule for pay-per-click is that you only have about nine seconds to engage a user from PPC and keep them on your page or they'll bounce. If you don't know what it bounces, go check out the episode on that. But in that nine seconds that we have, we need to capture a user's attention and we need to get them to engage. And yes, google can analyze this from their own data points and they're measuring what users are doing when they hit our page. Remember, you installed Google Analytics and the tracking pixel for Google Ads. They're using it and those are really all the magic factors.

So before I start waxing too much more poetic about capturing attention, let me also mention that there are those couple of other minor factors that are in Google's magic cauldron of quality score. They're on that page. We're not going to go over all of these today, but I really do recommend you go and read more about the quality score on that Google link in the show notes and pay attention to this stuff. And if you're not paying attention, ask your PPC manager to show you your quality scores. Or go, take a look at them and add them to your typical breakdown of columns. Drill down on what the issues are, where your issues are coming from and what you need to do about them if they're there.

Quality score is kind of like our secret weapon when it comes to Google Ads. I know I've beaten that term to death now, but every time I say it it's kind of true. Batman has a utility belt. I have Chrome bookmarks. The quality score really does matter for us because it affects our ad rank and that affects how much we pay for clicks. Every time a user performs a search, we go into that ad auction and a Google has a really good incentive to provide discounts to higher quality advertisers.

When we have really great content, we are effectively getting a discount on ad space and, like I said, it can feel like a fight with Google, but this is where our goals and Google's goals really do align.

Better content usually does lead to more clients and more revenue, and if we're able to get a discount on the traffic, we're getting in the first place. It's like an ice cream cone that fills back up every time you take a lick. And even if your competitors are outbidding you, quality score is your way to fight back. It's the weapon in your tool belt. You can beat them on quality, you'll get a discount, and then you'll hit them where it hurts. So let's sum it up Quality score is a game where we win a discount for creating content that our potential clients like and want to engage with, and as a bonus we also get to beat our competitors and get higher rankings on the page. If that's a game that doesn't sound fun to you, I guess I'm just going to have to try again next week, because that's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out rosenavertisingcom for more Thanks.