What matters (and what doesn’t) when it comes to ads quality

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Remember that there are differences between auction-time quality and the 1-10 Quality Score number in your account. Learn these ad quality tips.

Understand what does and doesn’t matter when it comes to ad quality

To address some common misconceptions, here’s a short list of things that do and don't matter when it comes to Quality Score. Understanding these will ensure that you’re focused on meaningful optimisations around ads quality.

The User’s Device: Does Matter

The user’s device (laptop, tablet, smartphone or whatever) is taken into account when ad quality is calculated. Make sure that your site experience is optimised for mobile, and if you haven’t already, try targeting users on mobile devices with specific mobile-friendly ads and pages. Google doesn’t require that you have a separate mobile site, but you should make sure that information is easy to find and that navigation is intuitive for users on a mobile device.

Relevance to a User’s Intentions: Does Matter 

Relevance to users’ searches and intentions is at the heart of ad quality. This means that ads and sites that help users to gather relevant info, complete a sale or other task and navigate with ease are more likely to result in high ad quality. This is why we suggest you focus on delivering relevant ads to answer queries rather than trying to optimise to manipulate your score.

For Newly-Launched Keywords, Performance on Related Keywords: Does Matter

Instead of measuring new keywords from scratch, we start with info about related ads and landing pages that you already have. If your related keywords, ads and landing pages are in good shape, we’ll probably continue to have a high opinion of them. Once we have additional data, though, we’ll rely more on that. Having a great account will influence our initial expectations of performance, but that will be replaced once there’s enough data for us to know with more certainty.  Always invest in growing your coverage on relevant searches, especially in areas where your ads have the potential to be high quality.

How You Structure Your Account: Doesn’t Matter

If it doesn't affect user experience, then it shouldn't affect quality or Quality Score. Set up your account in whatever way lets you manage it best, and feel free to restructure things like campaign names or the number of ad groups as needed. There's no such thing as ad group-level, campaign-level or account-level Quality Score. Note also that breaking keywords into new ad groups or campaigns (without changing the ad text or landing page) has no effect on their quality. But moving a keyword to a new ad group that has new ad text could change your ad quality estimations (and therefore your Quality Score), because that can affect user experience.

Running Your Ads in Other Networks: Doesn’t Matter

Targeting the Google Display Network or Google’s search partners in your Google Ads account won’t affect your ads’ quality on Google.com. As with keywords, use your existing performance metrics – conversions, cost-per-action, etc. – to test out search partners and the Display Network if you want to drive more volume.

Your Ad’s Placement on the Page: Doesn’t Matter

While it’s great to have a high position on the page, doing so doesn’t increase the expected CTR rating of your ads. The expected CTR is normalised for your actual position on the page. The top position is expected to receive more clicks than the third position from the top, and so on. We also normalise for other factors that affect visibility, like ad extensions and other ad formats.

You don’t need to bid for higher positions to increase Quality Score, so you’re free to bid for performance: the clicks, conversions and costs that work best for your business.