22 September 2016

Adwords Quality Score Tips: 3 Things to Help Get 10s

Wouldn’t you love to hit a home run with your adwords?

Adwords-Quality-Score-Tips--3-Things-to-Help-Get-10sGoogle’s Quality Score is more than just “hey, great job!”. It has a direct impact on your cost per click.

How much of an impact? Try this on for size:

50% cheaper.

Imagine how more effective your adwords campaign would be if your cost per click was cut in half.

What are the best adwords quality score tips to make your campaign more effective? Here are 3 things to get you there. Excited?

JONAH_HILL_MONEYBALL

What Google wants to see with your entire campaign is when someone searches for something, they see an ad that’s directly related to that topic and a landing page that has exactly what the person is searching for.

If you can nail down these 3 adwords quality score tips you’re well on your way to having a well-optimized campaign.

Set Up A SKAG Campaign

SKAG stands for “Single Keyword Ad Groups”, and it’s a way to have your keywords tightly integrated with your ads.

The Adwords process is pretty straightforward. It goes Keyword > Ad > Landing Page.

You tell Google what keywords you’re targeting, the ads you want to show, and the pages the person will go to when they click on the ad.

The first of our adwords quality score tips is to break your campaign down by each keyword you’re targeting. So, if you want to target “dog groomer”, “dog salon”, and “dog wash” as the keywords, you create an ad group that has these 3 keyword matching options, like in you see in the image below:

skag-campaign-layout

The reason why you want to target these (broad match modifier, phrase match, and exact match) is to give you insight into what search phrases people are using related to your target keyword.

On top of that, you create ads with compelling copy that are related directly to this keyword and have a strong call to action, like in this image:

ad-example-2

This then goes to a landing page that’s optimized for this keyword (more on that in a second).

All of this adds up to tightly-integrated ad group ads and landing pages optimized for that keyword.

Which is what Google really wants to see with your campaign.

It’s a little extra work than dumping all of your keywords into a single campaign and thinking you’re done, but the gains are worth it.

Run Multiple Refined Ads

Now that your keywords are grouped off according to each search term, let’s look at the second of our adwords quality score tips: the ads.

Here’s the thing most people don’t realize: you can have multiple ads for each keyword. This means you can try multiple versions of ads with different copies all for the same keyword. Like in this image below for “dog groomer”:

multiple-ad-examples

Google will even do the heavy lifting and try all of your different ads until it finds the best ones with the highest CTR or Click Through Rate.

What does this mean?

Google wants ads people will click on. So your adwords quality score will go up if your ads have a higher CTR. It’s one of the best tips to increase your adwords quality score.

It doesn’t stop there, by knowing which ads are performing best, you can make multiple versions of those ads to better optimize the campaign.

Optimize Your Landing Pages

So you have your ads targeted to specific keywords and that’s great!

What’s the biggest mistake you could make now?

Sending people to your homepage. At best, a person will click around and find what they’re looking for. At worst they’ll get confused and leave.

Either way, that makes for a terrible experience for everyone involved.

That’s what Google wants when a person clicks on an ad: they arrive at a page specifically designed for that ad. Think of it like this:

“Are you looking for dog groomers? Well, check out this web page! It has everything you’re looking to know about dog groomers.”

That’s essentially how your ads and landing pages work together. The ad gets the person’s attention and the landing page provides what they’re looking for. It’s important to optimize your landing pages to keep your adwords quality score high.

A well-optimized campaign means not only more clicks and leads, but those clicks and leads will come cheaper. It’s ultimately what Google wants to see – high-performing ads that are relevant to the keyword a person used to search, and landing pages that provide what they’re looking for.

If you put the above 3 adwords quality score tips in place, you’ll be well on your way to having a well-optimized campaign.

If you have any questions on other ways to optimize your adwords campaign, contact us and we’ll be happy to help you out!