Want a Good Quality Score on Every Ad Platform? Perfect the Post-Click Experience

Quality Score is a key factor in how well your ads perform. The more relevant your ad is to your target audience, the higher your quality score and the more likely people are to see your ad and click it. In other words, Quality Score evaluates whether you’re reaching the right audience with the right message at the right time.

One of the best ways to get a higher Quality Score across multiple advertising platforms is to optimize your landing pages. In this article, we’ll discuss how the landing page experience impacts your Quality Score on each platform and how you can improve your score across all platforms by perfecting the post-click landing page. To start, let’s dive into why Quality Score is important for advertisers.

Note: Although most ad platforms use the term “Quality Score,” others use “Ad Relevance,” “Ad Score,” or something similar. In this article, Quality Score is used interchangeably with these other terms unless otherwise noted.

What is Quality Score, and why is it important?

Quality Score is an estimate of how well your ads will perform based on their relevance to your target audience.

Scores are assigned a number from one to ten, with ten being the highest. A high Quality Score indicates your ad, keyword, and landing page are relevant to your audience, whereas a low score means they’re irrelevant.

Search engines and social media ad platforms want to show only relevant ads to users to provide them with a great user experience. Quality Score is used to determine which ads to show and how much to charge for each click or impression.

Google Ads was the first to introduce Quality Score. Many other advertising platforms quickly followed suit with similar concepts but using a different approach and terminology. Since each platform puts its own spin on the concept, they also each take a nuanced approach to post-click landing pages—one of the weighing factors in campaign relevance, and one of the easiest elements to control.

When created with fast page load speeds, compatibility with every screen, and an overall positive user experience, post-click landing pages can increase relevance and Quality Score, decrease cost per click, and boost conversion rates. Let’s take a closer look at how this is achieved across various ad platforms.

How post-click pages impact Quality Score on different ad platforms

Google Ads

Google analyzes three areas to inform advertisers how to adjust their campaigns: ads, keywords, and landing pages.

Three factors influence Google’s Quality Score:
• Expected click-through rate
• Ad relevance
• Landing page experience

Google weighs these factors differently when applying them to the Quality Score formula. Expected click-through rate and landing page experience weigh more heavily than ad relevance:

When Google measures landing page experience, it looks at the following factors:

• How useful, relevant, and unique your landing page content is
• How transparent and trustworthy it is
• Whether it’s accessible and optimized for mobile
• Your landing page load time and site speed

Take a look at this Skubana campaign, which likely has a high Quality Score:

• Exact-matching keywords in the headline and additional matching keywords in the description make the ad highly relevant to the search query
• The ad story continues seamlessly onto the post-click landing page
• Nearly identical headlines on the ad and landing page show relevance
• One conversion goal and no additional links keep visitors on the page and focused on the goal
• Multiple cooperating CTA buttons (also anchor links) provide several chances for prospects to quickly and easily complete the form
• Ample social proof (testimonials and company logos) make the page and brand more trustworthy
• Well-organized content with visuals delivers the message in a clear and easily digestible way

Microsoft Advertising

Microsoft Advertising Quality Score is nearly identical to Google Ads. It too rates the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages based on three components:

Expected click-through rate (above average, average, or below average)
Ad relevance (above average, average, or below average)
Landing page experience (above average, average, or below average)

Again, scores are given on a scale of one to ten:

Like Google, Microsoft’s landing page experience score describes how likely your landing page is to provide a good experience to customers who click your ad. Unlike Google, Microsoft explicitly mentions landing page experience is based on how often customers leave your landing page shortly after arriving.

Here’s an example from Propertybase that likely boasts a high Microsoft Advertising Quality Score:

• The exact search query “real estate website templates” is found in the ad headline and description, showing ad relevance to the user
• The page headline is similar to “real estate” and “websites”
• Only one offer/CTA keeps visitors on the page and focused on the conversion goal
• Multiple cooperating CTA buttons (also anchor links) give prospects several chances to quickly and easily complete the form at the bottom of the page
• Testimonials and company logos serve as social proof to convince prospects to redeem the offer
• Content is well organized with visuals, bulleted lists, bold font, color contrast, etc.

Facebook Advertising

Ad Relevance Diagnostics, formerly known as Ad Relevance Score, is Facebook’s version of Quality Score. This metric helps advertisers diagnose whether their ads are relevant to an audience and understand whether adjustments to creative assets, post-click landing page experience, or audience targeting could improve performance.

The diagnostics assess each ad’s past performance in the ad auction in terms of the following:

Quality Ranking: how your ad’s perceived quality compares to other ads competing for the same audience.
Engagement Rate Ranking: how your ad’s expected engagement rate compares to other ads competing for the same audience.
Conversion Rate Ranking: how your ad’s expected conversion rate compares to other ads with the same optimization goal competing for the same audience.

Although Facebook doesn’t mention landing page experience in their formula like Google and Microsoft, it references post-click landing page when explaining how to use Ad Relevance Diagnostics. Therefore, you still must optimize your post-click landing pages to clearly represent your company, product, and service and comply with Facebook’s Advertising Policies:

• Present content clearly and make sure the page is easy to navigate
• Ensure page content is relevant to your ad
• Match branding (look, feel, and style) between ad and landing page
• Avoid minimal original content, low-quality content, or content that is difficult to access
• Exclude excessive embedded or pop-up ads
• Don’t bait people into clicking ads by using overly cropped ad images, etc.

See how HubSpot’s Facebook ad campaign follows compliance:

• The main offer is obvious in both locations
• The post-click page matches the ad (offer, colors, keywords, etc.)
• The page content is clear, organized, and easy to navigate
• Click-through format provides a great user experience
• Multiple cooperating CTA buttons provide several chances to convert

Post-click landing pages affect pre-click performance

Whether they explicitly factor landing pages into their quality scores or not, all ad platforms evaluate relevancy. Because high relevance and a great user experience stem from focusing on a single conversion goal, every post-click landing page experience must be personalized.

Instapage allows you to deliver personalized post-click landing pages and create fast-loading landing pages with Thor Render Engine. To see this in action—and kickstart your journey to achieving high Quality Scores on every ad platform—request an Instapage Enterprise Demo.