When you run an AdWord Campaign Google assigns a Quality Score to each of the keywords you choose. This is a score that can either have a positive or negative effect on the performance of your campaign. In basic terms, a good score can give you an edge over your competitors so you want to consider doing what you can to increase that score as Google awards the advertisers who offer the best experience for searchers.
This score is variable that can either go up or down as the campaign progresses and a score is assigned to each of the keywords you use. This score affects the way your ad ranks and the cost per click you pay, so the higher the score the lower your cost.
What Elements Determine the Score?
- Google uses three factors to determine the quality score. These are:
- Ad relevance – this is the relevance of a keyword or search query to the ad in question
- Landing page – the reputation and relevance of your landing page to the ad and search query get you a higher score.
- A higher click through rate
How Do I Improve My Quality Score?
Following are 10 ways that we know of that can help improve the Quality Score of your Google Adwords campaign.
1. Know Your Quality Score
The most important tip we can recommend is to know what your quality score is. This helps when you are bidding on a keyword that has quality score of 1 out of 10. To find out what your quality score is sign into your Adwords account. Choose the campaign you’re working on and click the keywords tab and then click the columns in the toolbar right below the keywords option. Select Customize Columns and then quality score box. Add a check mark to the box and then save it. Now you should see the quality score.
2. Create AdGroups that are Tightly Themed
Be sure to place her keywords within themes as this will give you better a better Quality Score. I like to have notified keywords for each ad group.
3. Use Misspelled Keywords in their own AdGroups
Make sure you create a separate group for misspelled keywords. This helps keep the other Adgroups with a higher Quality Score. It always makes it easier to write with these misspelled keywords when they are in a separate category.
4. Create smaller Ad Groups Targeted toward Certain Audiences
By creating targeted ad groups you raise the relevancy of the search query and the ad and can focus on specific audience segments. Set up a campaign with several ad groups that are related to a specific set of specific keywords. This can take a little bit of time to set up, but it’s well worth it in the end. Avoid using just one ad group with all of the keywords listed in it. This keeps your ads from being relevant. At any rate you only want to maintain a small number of keywords for ad group. Good types of keyword variations include the use of plurals, longtail keywords and singulars. Group your keywords into logical associations or themes as this will help you set up the smaller ad groups.
5. Good Account Organization
A well-organized ad campaign is the key to obtaining a good quality score as well as that of getting better click through rates. Take the time to plan and set up each of your ad campaigns. This will help them run much more efficiently and bring you the results you want.
6. Optimize Ad Copy and Keywords
Take the time to carefully craft your ad copy, so that it closely relates to your keywords. This increases click through rates and the relevance of your keywords to your ad. Be sure to try to get your keywords into your ad copy whenever possible.
7. Optimize your Landing Pages
Make sure your landing pages are designed to correlate with your keywords. Whenever possible, design a landing page for each of your ad groups as this will increase relevancy. A landing page that is relevant to your ad copy will increase your Quality Score and your click through rates.
To see how Google sees your landing pages and which keywords are associated with them, use the Google Adwords keyword tool and the URL for the landing page.
8. Insert Keywords onto Landing Pages
When you send the clicks from an ad to your main page and don’t relate that page to the specific keyword, you’re making a mistake. You should stop sending all of your keywords to the same home page, and instead use specific landing pages for each set of keywords. This will improve your quality score, but also your conversions. It will also help minimize your bounce rate and improve the time of your audience on the site. You don’t want to send the traffic from 100 different keywords all to the same page. And you always want to include the Adwords keywords within the landing page content.
9. Test and Run Ads Simultaneously
Always keep at least two ads running simultaneously for each keyword. This allows you to test everything that you’re doing. It also helps you find out which converts better and which has a better quality score.
10. Call Google
When things just don’t seem right, and that can happen in Google, get them on the phone and explain the problem. There have been cases where keywords get a low-quality score simply because they match a trending subject. They may say that there’s really nothing that can be done but they will look into it and your scores should improve within a 10 day period.
Bottom Line
It doesn’t take a lot of SEO know how to improve your quality scores. If you follow the 10 tips above your score will improve, and maybe more importantly, your click through rates will too. You should see an increase in the quality of scores in a matter of a few hours.
Hi Steve,
The way you mentioned are practicle to any blog.Testing ads on different place are the best idea.