Improve Adwords Quality Score

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shabbir ( Go4Expert Founder )

Shabbir is a developer in the field of Applications, web as well as database designing and is devoted to the optimization and usability of the code. He maintains Programming forum and is a C++ addict.

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Introduction

I would tell you the points I used for one of my client who was paying USD 0.60 per click and I managed to bring it to close to USD 0.05 and he now averages very close to that but before I do what is Adwords Quality Score.

According to Google

"The AdWords system calculates a 'Quality Score' for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query. A keyword's Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC)."

"The Quality Score detail gives added insight to each keyword's Quality Score by rating it on a 1-10 scale. On this scale, 1 is the lowest rating, while 10 is the highest. 1-4 corresponds with Poor, 5-7 with OK, and 8-10 with Great. Please note that the Quality Score detail is not the same as the numeric quality multiplier we use when calculating Ad Rank. The Quality Score detail scale does not change the way that Quality Score is calculated or considered."

From the Above 2 Definition it is quite clear you should be having your quality in range of 8-10 which can make your Ad trigger more with less price per click. But the question is how and what are the factors which can help improve. Google Does not tell anything more than this.

How and why ?

You would read lot of content on internet including some Google Docs which says that CTR in Google Search is the key factor to improving quality and so the inference comes down to improve your per click price to get things moving. This is one of the wrong belief of the so called PPC expert which I wanted to highlight in this article.

1. Never increase your CPC i.e. Cost per click.
   
   First you should decide what would be per click cost if I had the Quality of 8. This can be found either from past experience or adding keywords and you see some of them hitting the quality of above 8. Now have that as the Cost per click for your all ad groups and I prefer to half the value of that for the content and placement targetting to start with.
   
   Now we have finalized the pricing we would pay for the click and you should never try to tinker that unless you get a quality of 8 and then also Google asks for more because increasing the price would not improve your quality score.
   
   
2. Don't love your Keywords but Move them
   
   You added some very good and relevant keyword but Google does not consider them as relevant and so either delete them or move them to some other Ad group.
   
   The reason Google Does not consider them may be because of the kind of Ad variations you have or the landing page does not have text which makes that relevant to your page. Use that keyword into some other Ad group or create a new Ad group with some variation of your page and then ad that keyword.
   
   
3. Lesser keywords in one ad group
   
   Don't try to put all your Ad campaign into one ad group. As a rule of thumb I prefer to have only one landing page per ad group and split keywords into smaller but more targeted Ad Groups.
   
   
4. Campaigns that target specific Location
   
   I have seen that if you have Asia-Pacific Region Targetting traffic you spend a lot less per click compared to other continent and so try having campaigns which targets some specific location. It can reduce your cost to a significant way. Use Adwords Editor to copy the complete Ad groups from one campaign to other but the campaigns are set to run for different geographical people.
   
   
5. Increase CTR of Ads as well
   
   There are two CTR's included in determining the quality score. Your Ad Variation's CTR, and each individual keyword’s CTR and Create multiple keyword relevant ad copy for each group and try removing Ads which are not getting Good CTR's
   
   
6. Historical Performance
   
   Try running your Campaign for the price we set in Step 1 for sometime and dont try to edit too many things at one time. This attribute is quite interesing because it indicates to AdWords that your campaign is improving , spending and becoming more relevant to Customer of Adwords, and so it will eventually reward you with good placement and cheaper clicks.
   
   Never delete your ads. Insert new ads, don’t just edit old ads. Pause the old under-performing ads and insert new ads. This way your not setting all of your ads’ history back to zero because Adwords does not continue with the history for an edited Ad.
   
   
7. Experiment With Matching Options
   
   Try having all the variations of the keyword like broad match / exact match / phrase match and try experimenting them and see which one get good Quality Score as well as CTR's .
   
   
8. Experiment more as you go along
   
   Implement Keywords into the content of the page and Split Test the Landing Page. Also you can use the keywords from the Ad group into the Metas and the best performing Ad description into the Meta Description. This not only helps in PPC Campaign but also serves as the starting point of your search engine optimization tricks.

Conclusion

After using the above techniques I have managed to get a quality score of 8 for all the keywords used for the campaign and 20% of them above 9 and 5% equal to 10.

Further Reading

Effective PPC Marketing Tips – Things you should do

[Safari]

This is really nice information.

[Nadr]

Good one.

[RockyMtnHi]

Page load time is also a factor in Quality Score as of 4/2008. Do this Google search:
site:google.com "quality score" "page load time"
I would have put the link in directly but I'm new here and it isn't allowed.

Thanks for the list...

[shabbir]

Article of the month competition nomination started here

[frank239]

its realy important information..thanks for sharing.

[david82]

I would also like to suggest that the quality of ad copy is pretty important because Google measures that as well. If your ad copy is not related to your target page or the actual keywords, it will under perform. Great article anyways. Thanks