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Oct 16 2007
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search, adwords, quality score, adwords consultant
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How to Win at AdWords with a Great Quality Score
I remember back in the old days when quality score was mysterious and new and was NOT an available column in the AdWords interface.
Now it should be crystal clear.
But if you're still wondering, let's take a look at it.
Quality score, sez Google, "is determined by your (1) keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, and (2) the relevance of your ad text, keyword, and landing page." - [numbers are my inclusion to relate to the following explanation]
Quality score is a summary of all those factors- there are two major things there:
1. Your CTR- How enticing is your ad to users? Do they click on it? Can you make it more stimulating? You are split-testing two ads at all times, right?
2. Mutual Relevance of ad text, keyword, and landing page- start with the keyword- then ask yourself, does the ad text contain the keyword, or even words from the keyword, or perhaps associated keywords? Next, does the landing page tightly relate to the ad text and search keyword?
Q: How Can I Increase My Quality Score?
A: Increase (1) CTR and (2) Mutual Relevance.
(1) Increasing CTR requires you understand what the searcher wants and persuade them you've got the best solution for their problem, or that you get the best results for people in their situation. Also, experiment with various ways of fitting everything into those 25 and 35 character spaces and which people respond to better.
(2) Increasing mutual relevance. Here, I assume Google must use part of its search technology. That is, they know whether a landing page is relevant to a keyword or ad text the same way they know which organic results to give you when you type a keyword into Google search.
This is where it helps to know some SEO. It's funny to hear people say that SEM and SEO require different skillsets - not here... you need to know how Google sees webpages and decides what they're about. Not that any of us non-Google-employees really know, but generally speaking it's about keywords and related keywords and where they're placed in the landing page's HTML.
Before I go any further with all that technical jargon, let's start with an example.
One of my clients is trying to get leads for aviation insurance and had to temporarily send all the keywords/ads to one "request for quote" landing page. The landing page contains enough keywords in links and in the the TITLE tag to make a number of keywords relevant, so their quality scores may be good or great for some, but others were poor.
Which keywords had a poor quality? Well, one keyword was really about one of his competitors. Since that competitor wasn't mentioned in the ad text or on the landing page, it wasn't relevant. And people weren't clicking on the ads after searching for that keyword. Thus, low quality score.
If you wanted to increase the quality score in that situation, you'd have to put it in its own ad group, create a landing page that mentioned the competitor's name, presumably position his services against that competitor, then create ads that also mentioned the competitor. Then because your quality score would go up, you'd have the best chance of getting low CPC and optimal conversion rates from that keyword.
NOTE: Naturally, bidding on competitors' names is controversial, and simply may not work for you- there are other situations where you could have a low quality score- it was simply coincidence that I chose one that you might not want to fix!
