Ad rank is one of the most important metrics that determines the effectiveness of your Google Ads campaigns. Optimizing this score and improving it can lead to better ad positions, lower cost per click (CPC), and your revenues.
Improving your ad rank is not as easy as it might sound, as you need to understand why you rank the way you do, and do a mix of various optimizations that improve your overall rank. Since a lot of affiliates have issues with this, we decided to help everyone out by covering this topic in more detail and explaining how you can impact it!
Understanding Quality Score and Ad Rank
So, for those that don’t know, Google has a quality score that it uses to rank the quality and relevance of your keywords, ads, and landing pages. Each of them is rated individually and then it combines the scores to get an overall score. The main components it rates are these:
- Expected Click-Through Rate (CTR): The likelihood that users will click on your ad if it's displayed to them. If the number is a lot lower than expected, then it's likely that your content has some issues and Google will lower its score.
- Ad Relevance: How closely your ad matches the intent behind the user’s search query. This is also connected with the expected CTR, as relevance improves it by a lot.
- Landing Page: The relevance, transparency, and usability of your page that users end up on after clicking on your ad.
After Google takes all of this into account, it determines your Ad Rank. That rank will determine your ad’s position on the search results page, and in general, it’s considered to use this formula:
Max CPC Bid x Quality Score = Ad Rank
The higher your score, the better your ad rank, and the better it is, the better the chance of your ad appearing in good positions at lower costs!
Recent Changes in Google Ads
Google is always tweaking its formula and how it determines Quality Score and Ad Rank. Depending on industry trends and regulations, they always slightly tweak it to get a more accurate result. Here are some recent changes that they made that could have some impact on your future campaigns!
- AI Powered Search Ads: Google has strongly leaned into its AI power. They are one of the world's leading companies when it comes to artificial intelligence and they are trying to capitalize on that through their products.
Just as they have started using Gemini to power Google search for regular users, so have they implemented AI to enhance ad targeting and performance.
- Privacy-Centric Policies: The first tech giant to focus on privacy was Apple, and with them all of the others had to implement privacy as well. For Google this was a heavy blow for their ads business as it made tracking users across the web a lot harder.
With AI, they have managed to do all of this while still having some privacy policies in place that protect the users. Now they have measures that safeguard private data while allowing advertisers to still target certain groups of people so these ads stay effective.
- Algorithm updates: Google’s biggest asset is their incredible algorithm. It has been trained for decades on millions of users and advertisers, and with the help of all that training, it's no wonder it became so powerful.
To keep its edge over the competition, the search giant is always updating the algorithm to better reflect the user's needs and requirements. Now, with the power of powerful machine learning algorithms, they have managed to tweak the algorithm even further for better performance.
Strategies to Improve Quality Score
Nobody knows exactly what the formula is to get the best quality score, but some things certainly impact the number, and here are some things you can do to improve it as much as you can!
-
Enhance Click-Through Rate (CTR)
If you remember, we mentioned before that every campaign has an expected CTR. If the expectation is not met, the campaign will gain a lower score. To make sure you meet the goals, here are some things you can do!:
- Craft Great Ad Copy: Clear and engaging headlines, gripping intros, and content that is action oriented and serves the user’s intent. All of this sounds much easier to achieve than it is, but with the help of powerful AI models, and expert copywriters, you should be able to achieve it!
- Utilize Ad Extensions: Extensions like sitelinks, callouts, snippets, and others can help provide additional information to users and increase your ads' visibility and effectiveness!
- Implement A/B Testing: Testing variations of your winning things can always be a great way to find out what works. Testing different headlines, ad texts, or creatives can be a huge help to learn what your audience responds to the best!
-
Improve Ad Relevance
Nobody likes ads that don’t match their needs or wants. Try researching your audience and understanding what their problems are and how to best approach them. Try using themed ad groups, that all have similar keywords and relevant ads, and compare them to other more broad ones.
A good option could be to regularly review your keywords and how they perform. You can even use dynamic keyword insertion to always update automatically your ad text based on the user's search intent.
-
Optimize Landing Page Experience
Your landing plays a huge role in your rank, mobile optimization is at the top of the list of influences, but there are other things as well!
- Mobile Optimization: Most of the online users will get to your page through their mobile phones and Google knows this. If your site is not mobile friendly, you won't be able to rank properly at all. The quicker it loads, the better the navigation and optimization, the higher your rank
- Alight Content With Ad: Affiliates often make the mistake of clickbaiting the audience and then not delivering on the promise. This is quite bad, as Google is smart enough to figure out that you are doing it and they will give your campaigns a downgrade in score.
- Clear Goals: If you have clear headlines, ad text, and CTAs with intuitive navigation to guide users towards desired actions, you are already on the right track. If you make a complicated mess that the users can't properly understand and navigate, Google will likely think you attempt to somehow deceive your audience.
-
AI and Automation
Just like everyone on the internet for the last few years, we can't stop talking about AI. AI is everywhere nowadays, and even the big tech giants like Google are using it for a lot more than you might expect. With that knowledge, you should also know that using AI for some things might be quite beneficial!
- Automated Bidding Strategies: AI bidding automatically adjusts bids based on various factors. It tries to get the optimal performance for the least amount of money, and save time and money with better performance!
- Responsive Search Ads: You can utilize AI to test multiple headlines and descriptions, allowing you to determine the best performing combinations to your audience.
-
Monitor and Adapt to Changes
In pretty much every guide of ours, we always like to mention how monitoring stats, optimizing, and adapting is the key to success, and the same goes for this!
- Stay informed: Changes are happening all the time. Some are good and some bad, but the sooner you know about them, the sooner you can start adapting your strategies to these changes. You never know when you will get the next chance to gain an advantage, so make sure you are always ready!
- Content Quality: Focus on high-quality content whenever you can. Generating AI slop, and content that nobody cares about has never been, and will never be the right path to success. Remember, Google is trying to always give its users the best experience, so your content should adapt to the users to provide them with that experience!
- Engage Users: Engage your users by making interactive and relevant content. Trendy content is also a great way to get them to interact with your ads and visit your landing page and hopefully convert!
Conclusion
Optimizing your Google Ads campaigns requires a lot of effort, but if you commit to it, it's well worth the trouble! Focusing on improving your quality score and ad rank can provide you with some great performance benefits! Focusing on CTR, ad relevance, landing pages, AI, and changes are things you should start doing and optimizing for! The sooner you start the better!
Have you run on Google Ads? What did you do to improve your ad rank and quality score? Share your experience with us in the comments below!