One of the most difficult aspects of marketing is developing effective campaigns that truly produce the best results. While most beginners have an idea of how digital marketing works, perfecting each element of a given campaign takes trial and error, as well as time and money. From choosing the right ad copy to selecting appropriate images (where applicable), this form of optimization can feel endless.

Through Google Ads, creating a variety of PPC campaigns is easy and fast. However, taking note of the feedback and information provided by the platform can shed light on what steps should be taken next. To help you along, we’ll look at the basics of Quality Scores in PPC campaigns and what you should be learning from them.

What Are Quality Scores?

Any information that can help better improve the performance of your PPC campaigns is essential. With Google Ads, one such indicator is the Quality Score. In short, this is a number that ranks between 1 and 10, and helps you determine just how relevant your ads are currently when targeting specific keywords and phrases.

A low Quality Score effectively means that you’re pinging noise at audiences, with competitors doing a much better job at convincing and reaching customers and users. A high Quality Score means that your ads are being received well by the audience and are relevant to their tastes – at least in comparison to competitors’ ads.

What’s the Purpose of Quality Scores?

Many people are probably wondering why Google even bothers to collect and display this information to users. After all, there are technically multiple Quality Scores and not all are visible to advertisers. What is the overarching reason for the use of these scores?

Perhaps the simplest way to explain the reason behind Quality Scores is to follow the money. Google is a private enterprise and is interested in making money. One of its biggest revenue generators is selling ads to brands and businesses. People generally do not buy ads or invest in marketing if they know the outcome is going to be poor. As such, Google is providing this information to advertisers to help guide them in the right direction and to further ensure that the right ads are being seen by the right people.

How Are Quality Scores Determined?

Now that you know what Quality Scores are and why they exist, you’re probably wondering what exact process is used to calculate them. As it turns out, there is a hugely complex series of calculations at work to determine these scores, but ultimately, a straightforward explanation is available.

Google uses its future-predicting algorithms to evaluate the behaviors of people on SERPs that are relevant to the ads in question. With that information, they then make predictions about how users will behave with content – and ads as well – in the future. While this may seem speculative, Google is incredibly adept at sniffing out new trends and shifts in search behavior, helping advertisers to avoid pinging noise into the aether.

Quality Scores are an excellent guidepost for any PPC campaign via Google Ads. They can help you determine whether you’re making the best use of your ad budget – in conjunction with other metrics – and they are yet another indicator of why Google continues to dominate the PPC ad game.