Quality Score: Why It Matters for Your Dental Google Ads
Quality score decides how much you pay for every click. Here is what it is, where to find it and how to improve it.
If you run Google Ads for your dental practice, you need to understand quality score, because it affects how much you pay for every click.
What quality score is
Quality score is a number from 1 to 10 that Google assigns to each keyword. One is the worst and 10 is the best. The higher your score, the less you pay per click.
That means the practice in the top ad position is not necessarily paying the most. They may simply have a better quality score, and be paying less than the advertiser below them.
Why Google uses it
Google wants people to keep using Google. If someone clicks an ad, Google wants that to be a good experience.
So if your ad rarely gets clicked, or people click and leave straight away, Google treats that as a poor experience and gives you a low quality score. A low score means you pay more.
Where to find it
Go to the Keywords tab. If you don't see a quality score column, click Columns, then Modify columns, and add it from the quality score section.
The three parts of quality score
- Expected click-through rate. How likely people are to click your ad. This is the most important one.
- Ad relevance. Whether the ad matches what the person searched for. In practice this is closely tied to click-through rate.
- Landing page experience. Whether people stay on the page, and whether it loads quickly enough for them to see it at all.
How to improve it
Google tells you which part is holding you back. In Modify columns, add the three component columns: expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. Each is rated below average, average or above average.
Then work on the weakest one:
- Click-through rate below average: improve your ad copy and add negative keywords so your ads stop showing for irrelevant searches.
- Ad relevance below average: make sure the ad speaks directly to the keyword it is paired with.
- Landing page experience below average: check page speed and whether the page matches what the ad promised.
Improve the weakest part and your score should rise over time, which means you pay less for the same clicks.
If you want me to look at your account and tell you what I would fix first, book a strategy call.