St. Louis Pay Per Click

Posts Tagged ‘quality score’

According to Google, Quality Score is determined by a variety of factors and that a higher Quality Score will result in higher ad position at a lower cost-per-click.  Clearly Quality Score is a vital component of any successful AdWords campaign.  But, how can you improve it?

 Here are some steps to increase your Quality Score:

1.)  Organize your campaigns and ad groups well.  Make sure your keywords within an ad group are related and relevant to your ads.

2.)  Use negative keywords to increase your CTR and decrease unqualified traffic.

3.)  Bid on your brand to increase CTR since your ad will most likely be relevant to those searching for your brand.

4.) Move underperforming keywords to their own ad group and write new ads for them.

5.) Manage your ad copy so that all ads in an ad group are closely related to the keywords in the ad group.

6.) Test destination URL’s to determine which ads produce the highest CTR.

7.) Test different ads to determine which produce the highest CTR.

8.) Make sure your landing page is relevant to your ad and keywords.

9.) Test different landing pages to determine which produces the highest CTR.

10.) Optimize your landing page, because Google also looks at landing page load time, navigation, links on the page, etc.

Increasing your Quality score is critical if you want to increase ad visibility and decrease your spend at the same time. The most important thing to remember is relevance.  Make sure your keywords, ad copy and landing pages are all relevant to each other.  This will increase both CTR and Quality Score and improve the success of your overall campaign.

Many advertisers have seen a large increase in their AdWords advertising expenses due to a sudden decrease in quality scores on their keywords. Keywords that once saw low cost-per-clicks and great quality scores have suddenly paused because advertisers can’t afford to pay the minimum bid. With the quality score being one of the largest factors in the minimum bids and ranking of keywords in Google campaigns, many advertisers are wondering “Should I begin looking to a new pay per click network?” While advertising on other networks can help extend the reach of advertising messages and present lower-cost alternatives, abandoning your AdWords account is not necessarily the best answer. There are several factors to consider when trying to improve a keyword’s quality score. Consider the information below when evaluating your Google campaigns.

What Google Looks For

Quality score is a measure of the user experience. Google reviews both the advertiser’s campaigns and landing pages to ensure that they are both of high quality. In measuring quality (according to Google AdWords), Google looks at:

• The keyword’s historical click-through-rate (CTR) on Google
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• Other relevance factors

All of these factors are used to determine the quality score for each keyword within a campaign’s ad group. With these factors in mind, here are some tips to help improve your campaign’s performance.

Relevance

This is one of the most important factors of the user’s experience, and one of the easiest for the advertiser to control. Make sure that the keywords within your ad groups are assigned to a specific landing page for the product or service you are offering. If you are advertising a specific shoe, you don’t send the visitor to the women’s shoes category page.

Ad Content

Make sure that your keywords are mentioned in your ad text. I know this sounds like a no-brainer, but many advertisers overlook this when creating their ads. Although a generic ad about the company is great for branding, it doesn’t necessarily your quality score. Assigning a few keywords to each ad makes this task easier.

Original Content

Just as it is important to keep site content updated for SEO purposes, advertisers should keep original content on their site for quality score purposes. Google places a great amount of importance on unique content on a site to help improve the user experience. Although this task may seem time consuming, there are some ways to accomplish this task without a large amount of additional effort.

• Blogs – This is a great way to continue to add fresh content to your site. Having an RSS feed on your blog on your site can create fresh content every time you post.
• Product reviews – Not only are these great for the user experience, this is also a good way to have your visitors provide content for your site.
• Testimonials – These are always great for conversion purposes and can add fresh content at the same time.

 Although there is no sure fire way to guarantee a “great” quality score, the methods discussed above can help you get one step closer. Google is constantly changing the way it judges sites within your network, which makes it hard to keep up with the latest criteria. Just continue to update your site and your content, which helps with SEO too as a bonus.