Quality Score & Ad Rank *DETAILED* Explanation – How My CPC Is HALF of My Competitors'

What is quality score and ad rank? Find out what it is in this video and how it helps me pay less than HALF of what my competitors are paying for every click.

This applies to both Google Ads and Microsoft (Bing) Ads equally.

Table of contents:

0:00 – Introduction
2:05 – A look at my (our) quality scores
4:15 – Auction, ad rank & quality score explained
16:31 – What you can do to improve YOUR quality scores and pay less

So, let’s get straight into this ad rank and quality score explanation!

Part 1: A look at my (our) quality scores

Most of the quality scores on my more long-standing campaigns are 8’s, 9’s and 10’s.

I’ll cover exactly how you can make them so high yourself near the end of the video, but this is what allows me to pay half if not less (ie. one third or one fourth) of what my competitors are paying for every click.

The best part is the quality scores of our actual case study however.

👉 ClickBank case study + optimization video: https://youtu.be/ZE8SmHLvT14

In it, the quality scores of our ad groups are mostly 6’s and one 7.

However after performing the optimization techniques on this campaign, the quality scores became mostly 8’s and one 7 – you can agree that’s a huge improvement!

All this is just to show you that it’s possible to really increase your scores as well so that you too can pay less for every click. Just follow along with what I share with you in this video and you’ll be on your way to drastically loweing your cost per click as well.

Part 2: Auction, ad rank & quality score explained

In order to understand quality score and ad rank, you have to first understand the Google/Microsoft Ads auction.

It works just like a regular auction – whoever offers to pay the most – in this case for a click – gets the click.

Well… kinda…

That’s how it USED to work.

But because this would result in incredibly irrelevant ads, just giving the click to whoever would pay the most isn’t the best approach…

And so something called a “quality score” was introduced, which is just a measure of overall relevancy.

It consists of 3 factors: expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page relevance.

In plain English, that’s just the overall relevance of the user experience all the way from the search term to the keyword, keyword to ad, and ad to landing page.

You want everything to go hand-in-hand together – if the search term is “how to lose weight”, your keyword would be “how to lose weight”, your ad copy should say “how to lose weight”, and your landing page should have something about weight loss on there too.

That’s really it – as you make the page more and more relevant, the score would go up.

Now if you multiply this score (1-10) by your bid, ie. the most you are willing to pay for a click, you end up with someone called an “Ad rank”.

This is the number that determines how much you end up actually paying per click and what ad position your ad shows up in.

I whip up an excel sheet and actually show you the real numbers in the video, so make sure to check that out… but basically quality score x your bid = ad rank.

And whoever’s ad rank is highest gets the top ad position, next highest gets second top, and so on.

How much you actually PAY is determined on your quality score and the ad rank of the person just behind you.

So the higher your ad rank is above the next top person, the less you actually pay.

And that’s basically how it works.

For your ad to show up, you can increase the bid, or increase your quality score.

Increasing the bid can get REALLY costly, so improving your quality score is much better.

So how can you increase your quality score? Let’s find out.

Part 3: What you can do to improve YOUR quality scores

In short, you have to make the whole user journey as relevant as possible.

You can achieve it in the following ways:

a) add a lot of negative keywords for words unrelated to what you offer
b) add single-keyword ad groups
c) create tightly-knit keyword ad groups
d) use long-tail keywords (3+ words)
e) use the keyword/most popular search term in the ad copy and landing page

If you do this and keep on doing this over the life of your campaign, your quality score is bound to go up as it did in our case study, and you will pay less than half of what your competitors are paying per click.

And this is the quality score and ad rank detailed explanation!

Additional resources:

👉 Free 55-page affiliate marketing for beginners guide: https://ivanmana.com

👉 Paid ad network courses: https://ivanmana.com/all-courses

👉 Unbounce (my favorite page builder) playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCRKGaWkdms&list=PLS46f4aLJ2hOdr6ZRw-9cnSXVWfa0r86i&index=1

👉 How to do affiliate marketing on Google Ads (with email optin): https://youtu.be/qd8dIeu4MDM

👉 How to do affiliate marketing on Facebook Ads (with email optin): https://youtu.be/UxTwsf8hyIg

👉 Like my Facebook page! https://www.facebook.com/onlinemarketingessentials

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