I have clients and potential new clients ask me all the time how can they improve their quality scores in their Google, Yahoo and MSN PPC accounts. Quality Score is based off of relevance to the users search query and user experience. The higher your quality score is, technically the lower you pay for your clicks and the higher you can get in position in paid advertising. Below are my top 5 tips on how to generate a higher quality score:
- Increase your click-through rates. No matter what, never stop testing your ads. If you have your ads set to optimize in Google, Yahoo and Bing, make sure you set them up to rotate. This will allow the search engines to not favor one well-performing ad over the other, but instead they will rotate ads 50/50. You want to rotate your ads 50/50 to test different messages. Each new message you test could mean an increase in click-through rates, which means a higher quality score.
- Don’t Ditch your account. Ever wonder if you should just start from scratch? Well, more than likely you shouldn’t. By ditching your account and starting over you’re losing all of your account history, the good and the bad. The only time you should be ditching your account is if your current quality scores are terrible, and I mean terrible.
- Keep things organized. One way to help achieve a higher click-though rate is to have fewer keywords in an ad group. This will allow your ad text to display the actual keyword in your ad group, which will make it more targeted and relevant to the user, improving your click-through rates. Take a look at some of your largest ad groups, and see if there are keywords that can be broken out into new, more targeted ad groups. It’s okay to only have 3 – 5 keywords per ad group. If you use Adwords Editor it makes this process of moving keywords much easier and faster.
- Remove under performing keywords and ads. If you have a paused keyword or paused ad, Google has stated that keyword or ad does not reflect your account quality score. Therefore, pause away at under performing ads with low click-through rates and keywords with low click-through rates and low impressions all together. This will help clean up your account to where you only have some of your better performing keywords with higher click-through rates active and generating a quality score.
- Keep your keywords in check. Quality score is essentially how well your keywords relate to your ads, and how your keywords and ads relate to your landing pages. I have several clients that have keywords that are no where to be found on their landing pages. You must have the keyword on your landing page!
- Load times do matter. Quality score is also about creating a great user experience. Having a slow landing page load time can influence your quality scores. Be sure your landing page loads on all browers, pc’s and mac’s within 3 seconds.
Your quality scores in Google will have a number associated to them that you can see. If you have a quality score under a 7 I would make some tweaks to those keywords and ads. Whether moving them into their own ad groups or testing more compelling ad text. Keep in mind if you’re using all three match types they will have the same quality score, but could still perform very differently. Pause which ever keyword isn’t working.
Remember achieving a good quality score takes times, nothing will happen over night. I would at least give it a few weeks to a month before you begin to see positive changes and lower costs.
     | do some of that social network stuff. |
To help keep CTR high, make sure you use Google’s add preview tool if you want to check your ads in Google: https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool and also make sure the person who you are making the ads for uses this tool too. Make every impression count!
Hi,
Amber, i am absolutly agree with you, i have one question that i am going to ask you. currently i am doing PPC, i have created add and finished all steps in Google, Still i am getting good impression and average position is showing 7.5 in Adword account, But nobody are clicking, even also i am unable to see my add in Google.
Can you solve my problem.
Great advise. Thanks for the words of wisdom!
Don’t pause ads – delete them. Google has been punishing some paused items as if they are active (ie Landing Page Quality Score). If you pause it, you are a sitting duck from here to eternity. Pause for a short while, but once you are sure you won’t use it again, delete!
Some people have recently lost their accounts due to Google being incorrect in stating paused items don’t count.
Hi Amber,
Great post about improving quality score. Have you ever had problems with getting a good quality score with a particular group of keywords because the keyword was not and should not be on the landing page, and yet the keywords brought in conversions?
I have been getting excellent search rankings on most of my key words/phrases for months, which I also had set up in Adwords, but yesterday I paused 3 of them that had become expensive for me. I thought I could pause them as I am getting top search rankings anyway (1 to 5 on page one results). But one day later, I have lost almost all my page one result listings on my key words/phrases. So the only conclusion i can come to is that Google punishes you when you pause words that they have made good money on from you. Anyone experienced this as well? I have now re-activated these words/phrases, but there was no immediate improvement so far.
Hi Amber,
Some great tips. Especially agree with point 3 – keeping keywords and ads organised in small ad groups. As you rightly point out, breaking out the keywords in large ad groups into smaller ad groups will allow you to write more relavant ads and improve Quality Score.
For advertisers thinking this sounds like too much work, it’s definitely worthwhile. Using the travel industry as an example, I’ve found there are opportunities everywhere to provide searchers with more relevant ads and improve Quality Score http://www.alanmitchell.com.au/techniques/relevancy-the-holy-grail-of-ppc/ . Even on popular keywords, advertisers which take the time and effort to build highly-relevant PPC campaigns can be rewarded massively with higher CTR and higher conversion rate in a supposedly saturated PPC market.