How to Improve Your Bing Ads Quality Score

Much like on Google Adwords, Bing assigns a Quality Score to each of the keywords in your campaign. Their formula is fairly simple, but it has a significant impact on your keywords' performance metrics.

So, why is my Bing Ads Quality Score important? Well, a lower Quality Score leads directly to higher CPC and a lower Share of Voice (Bing’s equivalent of an Impression Share on Adwords). In other words, you’ll pay more and perform worse.

Fortunately, there are always ways to improve your Quality Score on Bing. We’ll break down some easy, effective ways to raise your Quality Score by improving your keywords' and ads' Click-Through Rates.

Keyword Relevance

Choosing relevant keywords is the simplest way to give your Bing Ads Quality Score a boost. Here are a few easy tips for selecting the most relevant keywords possible:

1. Make sure keywords match ad copy – This is best accomplished by creating smaller, tighter ad groups. The more often you have specific keywords appearing in your ads, the better.
2. Stick to Phrase and Exact Match – Broad match keywords may help your ad appear on a wider variety of searches, but it will almost certainly affect your Quality Score on Bing.
3. Increase Exact Match Keyword Bids 10-20% Over Phrase Match – By bidding more for exact match keywords than phrase match keywords (for the same keywords, that is), you increase the likelihood that your exact match keywords will show.

Landing Page Relevance

A lower Quality Score leads directly to higher CPC and a lower Share of Voice.

As part of your overall Bing Quality Score, you also receive a Landing Page Relevance Score. As you would expect, this score tells you how closely related your landing page and ads are to a person’s search terms and your ad copy. While not quite as simple as increasing your keyword relevance, there are several ways to improve the relevance of your landing page:

1. Lower your landing page bounce rate – An easy way to do this is including links to other parts of your site. Sure, you may see a slight drop in conversion rate, but you’ll also see a higher Quality Score and lower CPCs.
2. Write relevant meta title, keyword, and description tags – Google doesn’t take these into account when factoring in Quality Score on AdWords, but they absolutely play a role in your Bing Quality Score.
3. Add text content with targeted keywords – You can do this in any number of ways. For instance, rather than simply listing a product on your landing page, include a keyword-rich product description along with it. You can do the same with reviews, testimonials, etc.

Landing Page User Experience

Even if your landing page is highly relevant, Bing will dock your score if the user experience isn’t up to par. Often times, a high bounce rate will indicate a poor user experience. While there are several ways to enhance a user’s experience, you should focus on these:

• Improve page load times – If your page takes too long to load, many potential customers may quickly lose interest in your site. Bing understandably considers this a negative user experience.
• Eliminate Popups – There may be no quicker way to annoy a user than bombarding them with popups. If you’re looking to enhance your landing page’s user experience, get rid of your popups.
• Don’t Auto-Play Videos – We’ve tested auto-playing videos on several landing pages over the years, and the results are never good. Videos are great features for a landing page, but you should let users click play whenever they’re ready.