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The Importance of Ad Quality and Marketing Congruence for Converting Customers

Published

June 16, 2022

Updated

December 8, 2023

The difference between hitting or missing your marketing goals is ad quality and the congruence between your target audience, the ad experience, and landing pages. Incorporating signals related to how consumers engage with your outbound marketing is critical to making the informed decisions needed to create a flywheel focused on driving media efficiency at scale.

Understanding Ad Quality

Marketing channels like Google or Meta provide metrics for marketers to better understand their ad quality. Google has a metric called Quality Score for keywords and ads, which is an estimate (a score out of 10) of how relevant your ads, keywords, and landing pages are to a person who sees your ad. Meta’s Ad Manager (f.k.a Facebook Ads Manager) has a similar metric called quality ranking, which is their method of quantifying ad quality relative to other ads targeting the same users.

Although the specific calculations and models involved with measuring ad quality are a black box, these tech firms have provided high-level guidance into the key signals. These signals include the target audience, creative itself, bidding and budget parameters, and, of course, the landing page.

Both platforms factor in different signals and weights from the advertiser(s) and users, but overall, a higher quality score leads to two outcomes:

• Advertisers pay less to serve ads to consumers.
• Consumers see more engaging and relevant ads from advertisers.

When these two are in sync, everyone wins. However, it’s not always that easy. Achieving congruence between the target audience, the ad experience, and the landing page experience requires detailed effort and experimentation. What makes sense for a Facebook Customer Acquisition campaign may not translate well for a campaign running on Google’s Display Network.

How ad quality affects your campaign performance

Whether you are in charge of customer acquisition, retention, or branding, relevance will dictate how well your campaigns perform. A common pitfall with media optimization is starting with a channel-led view vs. a customer-led one. Sometimes decision-makers will focus on only media metrics, such as CTRs or CPCs, which don’t always tell a complete story of how well a campaign is resonating with the target audience.

To win with consumers, key decision makers should provide thoughtful ad experiences throughout the customer’s journey and assign metrics that correlate with those moments. But as we know, the customer’s journey is not linear, so marketers need to take a human-centric approach, similar to design principles in their creative strategy, supporting the ad experience (on-platform) and landing page (off-platform) experience.

Focusing on both the ad and landing page experience will allow your message to resonate better with consumers and move them down their purchase journey.

Key Takeaways for Improving Ad Quality and Congruence

• Ad quality is more than just having the correct copy and images paired together . Ad quality ensures the customer has a positive experience with your brand. If the customer is engaged and finds your content relevant, there will be less friction throughout their journey.
• Establish a baseline and gather insights from your marketing partners. Before demanding more creative resources, or changes, leverage diagnostic tools and internal data to create a baseline and share that more broadly within your team.
• Test, Learn, Iterate, Repeat (TLIR). Connect with measurement experts (internally or externally) to put together experiments that will have statistically significant results.

Create a roadmap for your experiments once you have a sense of where you can dedicate your team’s resources to both on- and off-platform experiments. This is also an excellent opportunity to create an artifact that helps gain internal buy-in.