Does Ad Quality Score Still Matter in 2023?

0:00Welcome to Marketing School, the only podcast that provides daily top-level marketing tips and strategies from entrepreneurs that practice what they preach and live what they teach. Let's start leveling up your marketing knowledge with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Hsu.

0:20All right, we're going to talk about if your ad quality score still matters in 2023. So I'm going to define what that is first. Your quality score is how a Google or a Bing, when you're running ads on their platforms, it's how they score your ads. It's basically scored on a scale of one to 10. And there's a lot of factors. Your click-through rate could be a factor. How well do people respond on your page? You know, how well are they bouncing from the page immediately? There's a lot of factors that they look at to determine whether your ad should be shown above other people. And if the higher your quality score is, the lower your costs are typically.

0:54So that's what it is at a high level. We wanted to talk about if this stuff still matters because it's 2023 and quality score has been around for a while. And we thought it'd be nice to refresh on this. So Neil, you want to go first? It does matter. If you have a good quality score, you'll notice that it's cheaper to run your advertising and you'll get more conversions. The big thing that people make a mistake on is they just only focus on their ad copy and the targeting, but they don't focus on their website, the landing page, the experience that they're driving to those people who are getting or who are clicking on the ads.

1:29The other thing that they also don't focus up on is enough is rotating up their ads. Just because certain texts or images work right now for you, it doesn't mean that they're going to continually perform the same way in the future. You need to continually rotate things up, change it. And by it being a little bit more fresh, what you'll see is at least what we're seeing is you start getting better clicks over time, quality score still maintains really well. And it's just fresh versus just using the same old stale stuff for months. Yep. So a couple of things, I mean, with marketing, one of the first part, eight hours, So attention, interest, and then desire and action.

2:07I believe those are, maybe the D is different, but anyway, attention, right? Attention is your hook. So you want to make sure that A, like when it comes to quality score, you got to make sure you're picking the right keywords. Okay. That's kind of one-on-one you have to. So Neil talked about optimizing your landing page. That's one piece of it. So if you're saying, Hey, like come buy dog food. And then on landing page, it says cat food. There's a mismatch over there. Right? So it seems like a duh statement, but some people screw that up. And then also you got to think about the copy, like the way you're talking about it.

2:35Like if you're speaking premium language and then on the, or let's actually go back when Eric said dog food and then showing cat food or vice versa, where a lot of companies screw up is they have an ad for a nail and someone's looking for a nail with a hammer and they're showing nails on people's fingernails for like, Hey, here's some press on nails or whatnot. So you actually also have to be specific with your targeting. Is it Apple, the food someone's looking for, are they looking for Apple, the computer? Yep. And so, okay, the key thing here is the word optimize, right? If you're looking to increase your college score, so you got to pick the right keywords, you have to optimize the keywords over time too.

3:08You have to select the ones that are keywords that don't apply. You talk about negative keywords. So that's kind of what Neil was talking about, right? You have to make sure you're adding in negative keywords. Your ad copy has to be compelling. And just because you had a good hook, you know, last week doesn't mean it's going to continue to hold for the time being. So you have to constantly monitor that one as well. Optimizing your landing pages, your ad targeting has to be optimized as well. We have to be optimizing the different headlines. You're testing different elements, whether it's the headline, the sub headline or whatever.

3:32So the key thing here is ad quality score matters because that's how these ad platforms are ran. But the key thing here is if you wanna play the game well, you have to continue to optimize. That's all it really is at the end of the day. Neil? Yeah, and in marketing, a lot of people get metrics from places like Google or SEO tool or whatever platform you're using like Facebook ads. And people are like, oh, my metrics are really good there. Well, they're good there, but your marketing shouldn't stop. What about on your landing page? What about post checkout? What about your follow-up sequences, your upsells, your downsells?

4:04You can't just rely on, hey, my ad campaigns are running well. You got to optimize your whole funnel and the whole experience. And the funnel doesn't end with someone buying. It continually goes because people should try to continually buy from you. If you look at companies like Amazon, they make the majority of their revenue from repurchases. It's not someone coming and be like, hey, I'm buying from Amazon. It's no, I bought from Amazon and every week I'm buying new stuff. We buy toilet paper from their toothpaste from their, like literally everything, baby lotion, shampoo. We buy all our essentials from Amazon.

4:38That's a great example of them getting a customer in once and then continually generating more and more revenue from them. I remember when I was 24 years old, I had one of my first internet marketing jobs. I was working in an e-commerce store and I was running the ads for, again, we were selling lighting and mind you, this was my first month into my first internet marketing job. And I got into argument with the owner. And so the quality score on one of my ads was a 10. Okay. So I was like, look at the quality score. It's a 10. And he's like, did it drive any conversions? I was like, no. He's like, then it doesn't matter.

5:12But I was like, but the quality score is a 10. And so I was like, look at the click through rate, look at the quality score. At the end of the day, what matters is, is it actually converting? You have to take that into account. So anyway, I thought I'd share that funny story. You're optimizing for just one metric instead of really thinking about the customer and how to make money for a business. Marketing is not about getting people to your website or getting more followers. Marketing is about driving revenue and building brands. And the brands relate to or cause more revenue in the long run. And if you're not doing that with your marketing, then something's wrong.

5:45Yep. And the other marketing thing we'll leave you with is marketing's job is to bring you to the point of sale. And if you're not bringing them to the point of sale, then you're stopping them along the way and you are actually screwing up the point of sale or the sales funnel. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Also hit us on YouTube as well. And we will talk to you later. We appreciate you joining us for this session of Marketing School. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit marketingschool.io for more resources based on today's topic, as well as access to more episodes that will help you find true marketing success.

6:23That's marketingschool.io. Until next time, class dismissed.