Quality Score is the backbone of any Adwords campaign – it determines your all-important cost per click, and equally crucially determines where your ads appear on the results pages. Quality scores run from 1 to 10, with 1 being terrible and 10 being perfect. Running too many ads with a low quality score will result in you burning through money very quickly with little return, leading to you having to deal with a very unhappy client.
Fortunately, there are a number of ways you can improve quality score very effectively. Adwords rewards those who invest time and effort in their campaigns, and by addressing and implementing the points listed below, you can pretty much guarantee you will see a marked increase in your scores.
1. Ensure keywords appear in ads
Make sure your target keyword is in the title, text and display URL of each ad. Remember the URL you display in the ad doesn’t need to be the same as that of the ad’s landing page. If you can’t get your keyword into all these places without compromising the readability and persuasiveness of the ad, then make sure it’s at least in two of the three.
2. Split test ads
One of the most important parts of optimising an Adwords campaign is constant split testing and refining of your ads. As a rule, you should always keep at least two ads running for each ad group at any one time. You then pause/delete the weakest one, and create a new ad based on your best performing one, but with a slight variation. Repeat this process time after time, as it’s a fantastic way to continually perfect your ads and improve your quality score.
3. Try different keyword match types
A big mistake often made by those new to Adwords is to rely on broad match keywords to bring in all their PPC traffic. Using only broad is a sure-fire way to keep down your quality scores and overpay for your adwords campaign, so we tend to ensure that each keyword is targeted as an exact match and phrase match as well as a broad match.
4. Split down large ad groups into smaller, more specific ones
Bigger is not always better with Adwords, and rather than adding more and more target keywords to one ad group, its generally better for your quality score if you split them up into separate ad groups, each with ads specially targeted towards those keywords.
5. Optimise your landing pages
It should go without saying that your home page should rarely be used as a landing page (except perhaps when you are targeting your brand name as a keyword). Landing pages should be closely related to the ads you link them to, and that means making sure you have the target keywords in the body copy and meta description of that page. The more relevant the landing page, the better quality score you can achieve.
Einstein said the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If your quality scores are poor and your ads aren’t delivering the goods, then don’t expect them to improve just by leaving them to it – get stuck in and start making changes!
If you need a hand with getting your adwords campaign back on track, please let us know. You can read a bit more about our PPC services here on our website.