While your main concern as a doctor running their own clinic is how you reach and change the lives of patients in need of the services you provide, you are undoubtedly also running a business. And with all businesses, there are pesky matters such as overheads and costs that need to be dealt with.

Google Ads help you appear within the spotlight, that is, the first few results of a search, when your potential patients are looking for services and treatment options available within your clinic. Naturally, you would want to keep your costs low when buying Google Ads.

At this point you may be wondering, “how much do Google Ads cost?” – unfortunately, when it comes to ads, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Your cost-per-click (CPC) tends to vary depending on a number of factors, the most important one being your Quality Score (a metric used by Google in determining where advertisers rank and how much they pay). 

In this article, we will explore Google Ads, how you can improve your quality score, and how you can reduce your cost by up to 30%.

What Is Google’s Quality Score?

Google’s Quality Score is a rating of the user’s overall experience that your ads and landing pages provide when users search for your keyword(s). 

This is represented on a scale of 1-10, with one being the lowest and ten being the highest. The aim, of course, is to strive to be at the highest level possible, or at least in the higher range.

Here at Cleveraa, we constantly monitor our client campaign’s quality scores and make adjustments, where necessary, to their campaigns to achieve the best results possible for their ad spend.

Improving your Quality Score helps you maximise your ad budget and achieve more results with less spending. To do this, take note of the three factors that affect your Quality Score. These are: 

• Expected Click-Through Rate (CTR): This refers to how likely it is that someone clicks on your ad when Google displays it for a particular search. 
• Ad Relevance: Is the ad relevant and directly related to your keywords? In other words, does it make sense for the ad to appear when someone searches for a specific keyword?
• Landing Page Experience: Does the information displayed on the landing page correspond to what the ad is offering, and vice versa?

Remember, Google prioritises its users’ experience. This means that it is always trying to provide users with the most relevant, trustworthy, and easy-to-understand answers to search queries. These three factors lend heavily to impacting Google’s choice to display your ad over a competitor’s. 

Take note that by improving your quality score, you ensure that Google’s ranking factors for a user’s experience are met. In doing so, you avoid being penalised and lower your ad’s cost per click (CPC). As the graph above illustrates, the higher your quality score the lower the cost of your ad. By achieving the higher end of the quality score (8 – 10), you even receive a discount on the cost of your Google ad. 

How Can You Improve Your Google Ad Quality Score?

At Cleveraa, to help our clients improve their Quality Score, our team works hard to fine-tune both ads and landing pages to increase the expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and overall landing page experience. 

In the following section, we will briefly explain how we achieve these goals:

Improving Your Expected Click-Through Rate (CTR)

The expected CTR is an estimate of how likely it is that someone clicks on your ad when Google pulls it up for one of your selected keywords. 

It assumes that the search term will match your preferred keyword exactly, and does not take into consideration other factors such as the type of device the user is working with.

In relation to your Expected Click-Through Rate, there are three different ratings that you can expect to receive here:

“Average” or “Above Average” – Meaning there are no significant issues with your keyword’s expected CTR. 

“Below Average” – Meaning your keyword is expected to perform poorly in terms of CTR.

Should you receive a “Below Average” rating on any one of your keywords, you might want to change the ad copy related to the keyword to include more mentions of the keyword within your ad.

Our team of experts will monitor the campaign results to help remove keywords that people aren’t heavily searching for or add a wider variety of keywords to your ad group by running a keyword diagnosis.

Improving the Relevance of Your Ad

Another way you can improve your Quality Score is to consider ad relevance. 

Ad relevance refers to how well a keyword matches the message you are putting across in your ads. Again, there are three possible statuses regarding ad relevance: 

“Average” or “Above Average” – Meaning there are no significant problems with your ad relevance. 

“Below Average” – Meaning your keyword is expected to perform poorly in terms of ad relevance.

Cleveraa’s copywriting team fine-tunes your ad copy to ensure that it is relevant to the keywords that you have chosen for your campaign, ensuring a better result when your ad goes live on Google. 

Improving the Landing Page Experience

When you are trying to improve the Quality Score of your keywords, you should compare them to the copy on your selected landing page, as well as the landing page’s overall user experience.

By matching them to the keywords used on the chosen landing page, you ensure that both ad and landing page are in sync. This shows Google that you have a well thought out ad in place – lending towards a more positive user experience. 

Below are some factors we look at when designing our client’s landing pages. 

• How helpful is the landing page to someone who clicks on the ad?
• Is the landing page well-organised?
• Does the landing page include text that relates to the user’s search terms?
• Is the landing page clear in its directions?

Say someone clicks your ad, which matches their search term, but they are bombarded by pop-ups, or the page in question takes far too long to load. Factors such as these are likely to affect their user experience and cause them to exit your landing page.

With this in mind, we make sure the landing page is well-organised and has everything that the searcher needs. Our copywriting team also ensures that each and every piece of copy on your landing pages are of relevance to your keywords in your ad campaign to achieve a higher quality score and better campaign results. 

Want to learn more about how Quality Score works and how to increase your ratings? Reach out to us now for a free consultation!