Quality score for ppc advertising has been blogged about a lot in the past -and with good reason.
Having a campaign containing keywords with a quality score of 7 or above is like getting a discount on your Cost Per Click and Quality Score is as important to your Ad Position as your Maximum Bid. This means that those with a small PPC budget and a strong campaign can (theoretically) topple big brand companies from the top spots in Google. Another point to note is that for popular keywords there are more advertisers than available advertising slots, so having a good quality score can make the difference between being seen and converting versus not being shown at all.
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Here are LeadGenerators’ -the online marketing solutions experts, quick Top 10 Tips for improving your quality score:
1) Group keywords by relevancy: Make sure that you group your keywords logically. The general rule of thumb is that all key phrases in an ad group should share 2 words in common. This means that it is much easier to write an Ad that fits with the Groups keywords, and Ads that mirror customer’s searches receive a better Click Through Rate, which is the main factor in determining quality score. We have also found that this approach has the added benefit of being able to work out exactly what type of search terms work for your campaign and which are just padding out your campaign (read: wasting your money).
2) Good Text Ads: Write relevant and persuasive text Ads which mirror keywords as much as possible to encourage the searcher to click on your advert. To get inspiration and an idea of what type of Ad Copy works, I often spend time researching competitors Adverts, which makes sense as your quality score is judged against other advertisers who are bidding on the same terms as you. For one of our Africa clients, this approach has resulted in starting a new price orientated Advert and campaign, as I have discovered that many similar brands are using much more price competitive Ad Text. As a result we’ve received several lower cost, quality conversions. Also make sure that you always run more than 1 Advert Per Ad Group, so that you can test which sales message works best.
3) Remove Keywords with Low Click Through Rate: You should regularly go through your campaigns and remove poorly performing keywords. If there’s a keyword that attracts large numbers of impressions but few clicks and no conversions, than this is quite an easy decision. However sometimes more generic keywords have a low Click Through Rate, and I have recently noticed that these type of terms can produce high numbers of conversions. In this case, turning off keywords is not an immediate option, but there are other solutions (see point 4)
4) Use Negatives: Regularly running a search query report to identify unwanted searches for products or services that you don’t offer and adding them to your campaign as negative keywords can greatly improve your performance. To be even more thorough have a look in your Google Analytics account for any irrelevant high volume searches.
5) Relevant Landing Pages: There are several ways you can improve your landing page in relation to Google’s Quality Score, for example by making sure that the page you are sending traffic to contains relevant keyphrases. But at the same time the text also needs to read well and not be full of 100’s of different variations of the same keyphrase, as you should be using SEO principles to select important keywords for your copy and these keywords can in turn be used in your PPC campaign. Unlike keywords or Adverts Quality Score, any changes made to landing pages will not take immediate effect as it depends how often Google spiders your site.
6) Keyword Enriching Display URL: Very quick and simple but if you have enough room after your URL add in your Ad Group Name or most important keyword to your Display URL thread. This means yet more keywords in your Advert will be highlighted to the user which should mean more people will notice and click on your Ad.
7) Try One of Google’s New Ad Extensions: As mentioned in an earlier blog post of mine, Google has rolled out some new Ad Extensions, including Site Links giving your Ad Copy 4 more lines of text in which to sell your product and link to 4 key pages on your site.
8) Bid on Your Brand: Although some argue that bidding on your brand is an unnecessary expense, from my experience bidding on Brand terms is a very cheap way of getting to the top of Google and getting additional conversions. If someone searches for your Brand term in Google and then sees your advert, most of the time you are exactly what they were looking for so your Click Through Rate will be very high. Another positive effect is that as competitors are judged against each other for Quality Score, your Advert being there will automatically reduce the Quality Score of any rivals bidding on your Brand!
9) Bounce Back Rate: Have a look in your Google Analytics account to see what your bounce back rate is like. If people are clicking on your Ad and then leaving your site almost immediately afterwards then it indicates that either your Ad is misleading or your Landing Page is not relevant.
10) History: Although you can’t do much about how long your campaign has been active, it’s worth noting that an older account with good CTR and Quality Score has a distinct advantage over newer advertisers. But if you are given the choice at taking over a clients existing Google campaign and starting a new one from scratch this point is worth bearing in mind, as it can take a few months to build up Quality Score and lower the Cost Per Click of highly competitive keywords.
