Google Ads Quality Score & Ad Rank Guide for Dentists

The so-called Quality Score is one of the most significant aspects of PPC advertising and especially Google Ads campaigns.

That’s because the Quality Score has a huge influence on how your dental PPC ads perform and how much you pay per each click.

The higher the Quality Score the better, as this will lead to a reduced cost per click and ultimately a reduced cost per conversion, e.g. how much you have to pay to win a generate a new patient lead.

For PPC advertisers, an in-depth knowledge of major components that make up the Quality Score is required to improve their account’s rating.

What is a Quality Score?

Quality Score is a standard used by Google to estimate the quality and relevance of your ads, keywords, and landing pages.

Google quantifies the value of your ads using a diagnostic tool by assigning your Google Ads and keywords a quality score on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 being the lowest score and 10 being the highest).

The components that make up the Quality Score in Google Ads are:

1. Expected click-through-rate of your keyword
2. Ad relevance to the keyword
3. Landing page experience

While you can see an overall quality score for every keyword you can also break it down into the three categories expected click-through-rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. By breaking down your quality score into its components you can easily find which areas need the most improvement.

Why Quality Score matters?

It is a powerful metric as it is used by Google to generate your Ad Rank. The Ad Rank is used by Google to define your actual cost per click (CPC) by multiplying your maximum bid times your quality score.

With regards to crafting search algorithms, the programmers at Google are on top of their game. The Quality Score achieves the twofold goal of raising funds for the company Google while optimizing a user’s search experience.

It’s a fairly straightforward concept: an advertiser must be awarded a decent Quality Score from the search engine for a pay-per-click campaign to thrive. In order to accomplish this, said advertiser must have a satisfactory PPC ad that stimulates a high click-through rate (CTR).

This leads to more money for Google. The advertiser must also give the user a quality experience. This enhances queries and aids Google in offering the best listings they can.

With a good Quality Score, you obtain more clicks, which leads to a higher-ranking ad, and ultimately, a stronger ROI.

What is Ad Rank?

Ad Rank simply refers to the position of your ad in the ad auction. It is the value that measures the position that your ad occupies in the search engine result.

If your ad appears first on a given paid search engine results page (SERP), your ad rank for that particular search is number one.

Your Ad Rank is estimated by multiplying your maximum CPC bid with your Quality Score (i.e. maximum CPC x QS). Improving your Ad Rank is essential for lowering your CPC and cost per conversion, which correspond to a higher ROI.

How to Improve your Ad Ranking?

Since you already have an idea how Google determines your ad rank using your max CPC and Quality Scores, to effectively improve your ad rank, you need to do either one or both of the following:

Raise your keyword bids:

There is no any doubt that PPC advertisers who are willing to pay more on a CPC basis have an edge to rank higher on a given paid search results than those who pay less.

The more an advertiser is willing to pay per click, the more edge he has over his competitors in a given paid search engine results page. But paying more will be at the expense of ad quality and relevance.

Improve Your Quality Score:

Quality Score is primarily a measure of ad quality and relevance and it is a big proportion of how Google estimate your Ad Rank. With a strong quality score, your ad can appear on a higher position on a given paid search engine results page.

Because of its cost-effectiveness in determining your Ad Rank, Advertisers can focus efforts on these three major components of quality score to greatly improve their Quality Score rating.

The Expected Click Through Rate Matters

When it comes to improving your Quality Scores, what matters is not just the Click Through Rate (CTR) but the Expected Click Through Rate (eCTR). This is an estimate of how likely your ad will be clicked when appeared on the search engine based on your performance historically.

In estimating your Expected CTR, Google takes into consideration how well your keyword has performed based on both past performance and the position of your ad. Google uses Expected Click Through Rate (eCTR) to predict whether your targeted keyword is likely to generate a click on your ad.

Google makes use of three statuses for rating your expected click through rate. It assigns a rating of above average, average or below average to your keyword, using only the exact match keyword.

Both ‘’above average and average’’ expected CTR indicate that your expected click through rate keyword has no problems when it is being compared to other keywords across Google AdWords.

But ‘’below Average’’ expected CTR indicates that your keyword doesn’t appear relevant to your ad text. This is usually an indication that you need to assess your ad text and ensure that it is relevant to your targeted keyword to get people to your landing page to complete a desired action.

Expected CTR is a signal for advertisers because it helps them to clearly understand if their keyword lacks relevance or specificity. A high eCTR positively impacts your Quality Score, which makes your campaign more cost-effective, but a low eCTR will make your campaign less cost-effective by negatively impacting your Quality Score.

Expected CTR is a great way to make your ads more relevant, which in turn helps increase leads. Today, Expected CTR has a direct influence on how AdWords predicts your ads performance in the future.

Ad Text Relevance Leads to Higher Quality Score and Lower CPC

Always keep it in mind that higher Ad relevance equals higher Quality Score and lower CPC. Therefore, it is very necessary to concentrate more efforts on improving Ad relevance in order to improve the overall performance of your campaign.

A high Ad relevance can greatly help in improving Quality Score as well as giving Ad Rank a definite hike. Ad Relevance is another key components of Quality Score that helps determine how well the text ad matches your keyword.

It is Google’s measure of how closely related your keywords are to your ad copy. If your Ad relevance is low, you can improve it by following these five simple tips:

Create Tightly-Themed Ad Groups with Only Related Keywords:

Make sure to use only keywords that are relevant to your ad text. Using keywords that don’t match or related to what you want to advertise will only get you a low Ad relevance score.

Write Text ads that Include the Actual Keywords:

one of the best ways to optimize your Ad relevance is by including the main keyword in the ad title and in at least one of the description lines.

Don’t Get Too Creative:

It is a good thing to be creative when writing compelling ads, but sometimes getting too creative by including flamboyant phrases in the ads’ titles and description lines can have a negative impact on your ads. This usually occurs when the words used in the ads are not related to the keywords in the ad group.

Choose the Ideal Landing Page and Exclude Missing Keywords:

Google’s main concern is about relevancy. So, in order to improve you Ad relevance, your ad’s content must correspond with the landing page’s content.

There’s a Lot To Gain From an Awesome Landing Page Experience

This is the final key component of Quality Score. It is a measure of how useful the landing page is to the users visiting the page. If you want to turn clicks into conversions and you don’t want to miss out on valuable conversions, a great landing page experience is the answer for these.

Having a poor performing landing page has negative impacts on Quality Scores, which will result into paying more for each click. The landing page should be transparent, easy to navigate and feature relevant and original content.

If your Landing pages have been rated ‘’below average’’ by Google, following these 5 simple tips can really help improve your landing page Quality Score.

Check the Relevancy of your Landing Page Content to your Ad:

It is of greatest significance that the content of your landing page should match your ad text and the ad’s keywords. The more closely related your landing page is to the ad text and the ad’s keywords, the better your landing page Quality Score.

Don’t Overwhelm the Visitor with Links:

Only provide the most relevant links on your webpage to your visitors such as a link to make an order, contact info, and a link to the homepage, are more than enough. Overwhelming the visitor with links will only increase the likelihood of the user leaving your Landing page.

Call To Action:

Feature a clear and powerful call to action that attracts visitors to your landing page.

High-Quality, Relevant Images:

Featuring images alongside page text makes the landing page much more appealing to the visitors.

Write a Powerful Heading:

Have a clear, relevant and attention-catching header on your landing page.

Final Word…

Quality Score is tied to these three main components. These are the key components that PPC advertisers need to monitor and optimize if they want to have a high Quality Score Rate on Google’s AdWords.