How to Improve Your Google Shopping Ad Quality Score – Long Term

What exactly is Google shopping ad quality score? 

Your Google shopping ad quality score is a number between 1 and 10. It’s an overall indicator of how well your ads will perform. 

Google doesn’t actually use your score when determining the outcome of auctions, but they do use various metrics that go towards your final score. In short, your quality score is like a diagnosis of your Google shopping ad account – if it’s low, you’ve got yourself a problem. 

It’s measured from three key metrics

Your Google shopping ad quality score is made up of three key metrics that determine the overall user experience of your ad and its destination. These are: 

• Relevance: Your ad is showing people what they are searching for. 
• Landing page quality: Your ad redirects people to a page that actually answers the ad. 
• Click Thru Rate (CTR): How many times your ad is clicked, compared to how many times it is seen. A high CTR indicates that your ad is relevant and useful.   

You can improve your Google shopping ad quality score by optimizing these three key areas. 

It only applies to exact match keywords

You only get a quality score for exact match keywords. This is when you set up your ads to be shown when someone searches for the exact query in your keyword. 

For example: 

• My exact match keyword is “wedding photography services” 
• This means my ad won’t show if someone searches just “wedding photography” 
• But it will still show if someone searches “wedding photography services in Seattle” 

There are also broad keywords, which will show vastly related results, and phrase match keywords, where someone can search terms around the subject and still see your ad. These two can make your ad seen by more people, but they might not be the right people. 

Note: Google will also look at the success of related keywords – including those used by your competition when determining the quality score of newly-launched keywords.

Your quality score makes and saves you money

Having a high Google shopping ad quality score will result in your ads being placed in better positions. This increases the chances of them getting seen and clicked, which obviously increases your chances of making sales. 

That part is obvious. 

What’s less obvious is that a high Google shopping ad quality score will also reduce the cost per click (CPC) of your ads, and it’ll reduce the bid estimates required for your ads to rank high. 

On top of all this, a good quality score also allows you to use more ad extensions. This includes the ability to add your business location, contact, site ratings, and extra internal site links to your ads. 

How to improve your Google shopping ad quality score

Now that you know what your Google ad quality score is and why it’s important, it’s time to optimize it. We’re not going to cover any quick tricks or hacks, or any similar BS. This article is all about long-term approaches to improving your quality score and your user experience. 

Why? Because that’s what Google cares about. 

It’s much more important to produce relevant ads that solve users’ problems, rather than simply optimize ads to manipulate the system. The latter will eventually result in penalization.

There are three main ways you can improve your quality score of Google shopping ads. We mentioned them earlier: relevance, landing page quality, and CTR. 

There are other elements that come under these three categories, like mobile optimization, that we could write an entire separate article on, but we’re going to keep this direct and concise today. 

Increase Google shopping ad relevance 

This is what Google is looking for first. Your ads need to be relevant to the people you’re targeting. How else can Google make sure the right people are seeing your ad? 

Use keywords that match your target audience’s intentions. Also, make sure your landing pages are relevant to the ad itself. There’s no point running an ad for one thing that leads to a landing page about something else. 

Research quality keywords 

This should go without saying. Make sure you thoroughly research keywords and never just assume what a user might search for. 

Using tools like keyword.io and Ahrefs, as well as Google AdWords and even Bing Keyword Research Tool can give you a broader understanding of related keywords. 

There’s a lot of talk about how many keywords you should use in an ad group. Generally, don’t go over 20, and remember that the focus is on quality, not quantity.

Write a Google shopping ad with the good quality score

It doesn’t just end with having quality ad groups, you need to write great ad copy as well. 

• Use the keyword in the title, description, and the URL
• Keep the title at an optimal length 
• Use active voice  
• Include a call to action (CTA)
• Focus your descriptions on features, benefits, singling out the customer, and a CTA

Ensuring your ad is relevant is as much about the landing page it takes the user to as it is the ad itself. Having relevant keywords is the easiest step. 

Let’s take a closer look at how a good ad looks like!

Improve your Google shopping ad quality score by optimizing your landing pages 

The landing page for your ad is the thing that affects the user experience most. Google takes landing page quality very seriously – although it can only measure this in so many ways. It’s more difficult to measure subjective page quality than it is to measure keywords.

The relevance of your landing page is taken into account. This is measured by the content on the page, including keywords and how relevant the copy is to the Google shopping ads. Some other factors include:

• Keywords: Use keywords in the page title, the opening paragraph, and elsewhere throughout. Make sure to also use keywords in the page URL.
  
• Navigation: Navigation is also considered. Sites with difficult internal navigation will be penalized. You should have a clean and prominently-displayed menu with effective elements. Also, make sure your footer navigation is clean.
• Page speed: Google doesn’t have much patience, and nor does anyone else. More than 50% of people will leave a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load. Optimize your page speed by:

1. 1. Using JPEG images
   2. Removing animations 
   3. Stop auto-playing videos 

• Mobile optimization: The world is switching to mobile. Google will punish you if your landing pages aren’t optimized for performance on different devices. Make sure your landing pages work on laptops, smartphones, and tablets. 
• SEO best practices: Optimizing content on your landing page is a lot like basic SEO. Optimize for keywords, but make sure the focus is on creating high-quality content that will benefit the user. 

Making sure your landing pages are up to scratch will improve your site’s organic ranking on SERPs, as well as giving you an edge on ad campaigns. This is one juicy bonus! 

Increase your Click Through Rate (CTR) 

Google struggles to measure the quality of your landing pages because this is a difficult task to perform via an algorithm. But there is one other way they can gauge it: your assumed CTR. If a hefty percentage of people who see your ad click on it, then it must be relevant to them. Google will use this data to improve your Quality Score. 

Google also uses the CTR of your previous ad campaigns to judge your quality score. If you consistently run incredible campaigns, then it’s safe to assume that your next one will be pretty good, too. 

Google has limited data to start with when you run a campaign with new keywords, so it has to use previous performance, related keywords, and the ads of your competitors to make assumptions about how well this campaign will perform. 

PRO TIP: Optimize your product feed for a higher CTR!

Do you know that optimizing product feed is the first step towards boosting your CTR on Google Shopping? However, even with tech-savvy merchants, it’s not easy to do so manually due to lots of Google Merchant Center errors you might encounter.

With that in mind, you need Socialshop, the best Shopify app that lets you sync your entire Shopify catalog and keep it regularly updated on Google Merchant Center easily.

Final thoughts

It’s important and also necessary to improve your Google shopping ad quality score. Ultimately, it’s not even used by Google – it’s just for you. Still, your quality score is an indication of how well your Google AdWords account is performing in various areas.

You boost your quality score by improving the areas of your account that really do matter. Implement the aforementioned strategies and watch your score get higher. Good luck.