Generally speaking, the higher your keywords’ Quality Scores, the more Google will like you. And the more Google likes you, the less it’ll charge you for your ads to appear in strong positions in the SERPs.

But there a few instances when low-Quality-Score keywords might actually be a good thing. Here are three situations when it’s OK to have low-Quality Score keywords:

1. The keywords are bringing you a high return on investment.

Your keywords’ Quality Scores may be below 4 or 5 (on a scale of 1 to 10), but if their associated ad is achieving a large net profit, you might want to tolerate those low Quality Score keywords. While your ad might be a little lower in the search results than you’d like, you are making good money.

One possible explanation for your situation is that you have a low click-through rate, but a high conversion rate. Not a ton of people are clicking on your ad, but those who are are buying your product or registering for your free download. That must mean your ad copy is highly relevant to your offering.

2. The keywords are valuable for branding.

Maybe you’ve surveyed customers to see what keywords they think best describe your product or service. But for some reason, some of those keywords have low Quality Scores in your advertising campaign. You may not want to remove those keywords if you feel they are serving a significant branding purpose.

Even though your click-through rates might be low, at least your ads are informing viewers about what you offer. And maybe those people are coming back at a later time to convert.

One way to measure whether or not people are coming back is by looking at your view-through conversion statistics in your AdWords account. Your view-through conversion rate, for example, tells you the percentage of users who viewed an ad and neglected to click on it, but within 30 days went to the ad’s associated landing page and undertook the desired action.

3. You are just starting an AdWords campaign.

If you are just starting an AdWords campaign, it’s understandable that you have low-Quality-Score keywords. You are still learning about optimizing ads and landing pages, and have yet to put all your knowledge into practice. While some people might wish all their keywords had high Quality Scores from the start, others might see the benefit of not having a perfect campaign right away.

Not having perfect Quality Scores initially means you will develop the good habit of doing your research and tweaking your campaign. If Google ever changes its Quality Score formula, or if you decide to advertise with another search engine, you will be well positioned to handle these changes. You will seek out information, and improve your campaign. But if you are used to having perfect Quality Scores that don’t require any effort, you will have a tough time adapting to new Quality Score rules.

About the Author

Christine Laubenstein is a Marketing Associate at WordStream, a provider of an advanced pay-per-click tool suite, designed to improve the performance of pay-per-click keywords in your AdWords campaign.

The more I manage long term clients the more I realize everything I do today will greatly effect what happens to my account Quality Score in the future.

Achieving a great Quality Score does not happen overnight. It may take a week, a month or longer. But by constantly optimizing your PPC account over time you will see the effects of having a great Quality Score. Those effects are mainly seen in the cost it takes to get your PPC ads in higher positions.  Over time, your costs should be less, and your ads should have higher placements.

I mainly work with my ad groups and ad texts to achieve a great Quality Score. And lately my new Google rep mentioned something to me that I don’t think I realized before.

She mentioned that paused or deleted ads/keywords do still have an effect on your account Quality Scores. Now I could have sworn my Google reps before told me that paused and deleted ads or keywords do not have a negative or positive effect on your quality scores because they’re no longer active. After all, you’re supposed to pause or delete poor performing ads/keywords; so why would a paused or deleted ad/keyword still negatively affect your Quality Score?

To add to this, even Adwords Pro Sarah on 11/5/09 mentions that although pausing or deleting have the same effect, that if you pause or delete a group of great performing keywords, your Quality Score would be based on the ok and poor performing keywords in that ad group, and no longer the great performing keywords you paused.

You’re right- there is no difference between deleting and pausing in terms of Quality Score. The only real way you could see an affect is in a scenario like this: you have 100 keywords, 50 performing well, 25 performing ok and 25 performing poorly. If you paused all 50 high performing keywords, your account quality score when then be calculated from the ok and poor performing keyword- so you would see a drop in the overall account Quality Score. That said, if you reverse the scenario and only pause the poor keywords, you could see a positive affect.

(AdwordsPro Sarah).

If anyone was under the impression that paused or deleted keywords or ads didn’t have an effect on your overall account Quality Score, please throw that out the window.

The following is a statement from my Adwords rep stating when to pause and/or delete ads/keywords in order to achieve a higher account Quality Score:

The historical performance of paused or deleted ads and keywords will continue to affect your account history. However, we still recommend deleting poorly performing ads and keywords to improve Quality Score. This will prevent the ads and keywords from performing poorly in the future and further affecting your account history. As the rest of your account accrues more performance history over time, the impact that the deleted ads and keywords have on your Quality Score will diminish.

I think it’s a good idea to delete poor Quality Score keywords and ads so they don’t accidently get resumed for some reason. Just note that in Adwords you can still resume deleted ads/keywords – so be careful of that.

If you’re really trying to increase your click-through rates (as you should be) delete those old poor performing ads, and continue writing new ads to test to increase your click-through rates. That should help over power old deleted ads or keywords that have lower Quality Scores.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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!
6. 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.

In a recent post I discussed how moving keywords can affect your campaigns performance, and today we’re focusing on ad texts. As you know, ad text optimization is a continuous process where you eliminate your under performing ad texts and insert new variations to test against your best ads. However, there are times when you need to make major changes to all of your ads at once. Reasons for this change can be launching a new website or switching out promotional offers. We’ll focus on the later today.

With e-commerce clients, special offers can change frequently. And these changes need to be highlighted within your PPC ad text. Featuring special offers such as “free shipping” or “25% off” or “Buy 1 Get 1 Free” in your ad texts is a great way to increase your click-through rate (CTR) and your conversion rate. But making frequent global changes to your PPC ad texts can wreak havoc on your Quality Score. Why does this happen?

Keep in mind that your ads and keywords have a symbiotic relationship that has accrued a performance history, and when you sever that relationship, it can negatively affect your account. Therefore if you pause or revise all of your ads in a given ad group, your Quality Score can take a hit and so can your performance.

How do you change your ad texts while mitigating these negative results? You can use one or more foundation ad texts. What’s a foundation ad text?

Foundation ad texts are the ads that remain within your ad groups that don’t highlight your specific offer. They are still keyword-focused and benefit-driven, but they don’t highlight your ever-changing offer.

Since special offers can be the juice that improves your overall campaign, you don’t want to have too many foundation ad texts in each ad group, but having one or two ads within each ad group that are a constant presence that don’t get altered for different offers can help stabilize your Quality Score and performance. This is why they are called “foundation ad texts.”

Here is an example:

Let’s say you have a “25% off” offer that is going to end on Thursday, and on that same day you’re going to launch a new “free shipping” offer. Over the course of Monday through Wednesday you can slowly pause your “25% off” ads shifting your focus toward your foundation ad texts. And when Thursday arrives, you can insert your 1-3 new ad texts that highlight your “free shipping” offer. This way your not completely jolting your account by pausing all your ads and inserting new ads all at once.

By doing this, you’ve slowly removed your old ads allowing your foundation ads to maintain your Quality Score, and then inserted your new ads. Sure, with new ads there is going to be a period of adjustment but using this method may help smooth out the bumps in the road when switching our offers.

Restructuring your account does not cause you to lose your historical Quality Score information. The historical performance of your keywords, ads, and landing pages is preserved when you restructure your account. Therefore, we encourage you to restructure or optimize your client’s account structure as needed.

Let me first say that I agree with this statement. The historical Quality Score for a particular keyword does transfer when the term is moved into a new ad group.

However, keep in mind that when you move a keyword you can temporarily reset its Quality Score, therefore negatively effecting your ad position and overall performance.

Why does this temporary set back occur? AdWords needs to re-acclimate to this keyword’s new location and possibly new ad text. This means that when you do a major account re-structure, you will see a fluctuation in your performance. If you have optimized your account for the better, then your performance will begin to pick up after the restructure – but it will take a little time.

Another reason a temporary set back can occur is due to the relationship between your keyword and ad text. As your keyword builds its click-through rate, it is invariably tied to a specific ad text within your ad group. In a way, they share the Quality Score. When you move a keyword but neglect to bring the ad text with it into the new ad group, you have effectively severed that relationship.

If your keyword has performed well historically, then it will gain back its Quality Score, ad position, and performance relatively faster than a keyword that was performing poorly in another ad group, or a completely new keyword. So, what was said in the Fact of the Week is true, you won’t lose your historical Quality Score and that historical Quality Score will help you re-gain your keyword’s traction.

And this brings me to another topic on restructuring: moving a keyword that is doing poorly will not automatically help improve its performance. If you have a keyword that is relevant and has more potential if it’s in a different ad group, then move it. But if you are moving a bunch of keywords to try and reset their historical performance, that won’t work. And this is why historical performance does follow a keyword even if its moved. A bad keyword in any group is going to have a low Google AdWords Quality Score.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t restructure your account. In fact, we highly encourage you to optimize your account structure in order to enhance your account’s performance.

This is why I want to expand on this Quality Score tip. It isn’t wrong. It just doesn’t give the full picture. Restructuring your campaigns is a great to make your ad groups more focused and write better targeted ad texts. But there will be some bumps along the way.

Okay, I’ll just say it: you may break your PPC account. However, I want to discuss why making a global change to your PPC account is a big deal; what will happen when you change all of your destination and display URLs at the same time; some tips to mitigate the initial shock to the PPC system; as well as some tips to get your performance back up to speed.

As you learn how to better engage your audience, provide a more rewarding user experience, and increase your conversion rate, your website will evolve over time. And sometimes your website will make an even bigger leap to a new name and URL. If you’ve done your research and have a great team in place, then launching a new website is probably the best decision for the launch haul. But expect some bumps when it comes time to make the switch in your PPC campaign.

Launching a new website is one of the global changes you can make to a PPC campaign that can severely effect your performance. Here are a few reasons why this is such a major change:

• You will have to update all of the display and destination URLs within every PPC ad. This means you’ll either need to pause all of your old ads and launch new ads with your updated website info. Or you’ll alter all of your current ads with this new information. Either way, Google AdWords will see these ads as new submissions. This means you’ll have to re-build your AdWords Quality Score and historical performance for these ads.
• Google AdWords will have to evaluate this new website site/landing page. I don’t have any time frames set in stone from AdWords as to how long this takes, but it can take a while to re-build this trust.
• Any time you make a global change to a PPC campaign, this sends up a red flag. The search engines prefer slow, gradual changes over time as you optimize and enhance your campaign’s performance. Changing all of  your ads at once definitely shocks the system.

Those are a few reasons why launching a new website is a big change for your PPC campaign. However, what should you expect when you change all of your ad texts at once in order to send users to your site? This what I’ve seen in the past as a result of this global account change (keep in mind, these symptoms my not always occur, but they occur frequently and you should plan accordingly):

• Your Quality Score can take a hit. By this I mean your Quality Score could decrease. This is because your ads and keywords have a symbiotic relationship that has accrued a performance history, and when you sever that relationship, it can negatively affect your account.
• This means that your ad positions on the search and content networks will decrease.
• If you ad positions decline, your impression share will decline on the search network. And your impression/click volume on the content network can decrease due to lower positions.

In a sense, you’re shocking your Quality Score and your account may see a deflation in volume due to the changes. But this doesn’t mean that you should never re-launch your website or make major changes that may negatively effect your PPC campaign. But while you’re in the development stage of your new website, you need to plan for a fluctuation in your PPC performance when the change occurs.

So, how do you mitigate this performance fluctuation and how do you get your account back on track when this does occur? Those are some good questions. First, let’s discuss some actions you can take before you launch the new website in your account:

Set the proper expectations

Let everyone know (who needs to know) what to expect when this change occurs. This will help preserve your sanity. If everyone knows that you’ll have to re-build your performance history and Quality Score beforehand, that will make your life much easier.

Optimize your account structure

Optimizing your account structure can create tighter ad groups with more focused and relevant ad texts. The result of these efforts can be a higher click-through rate. You should review/tweak your account structure and make changes a few weeks before your new website launches. You should do this step a few weeks in advance because you’ll need to give your account time to adjust to these restructuring changes.

Keep in mind that restructuring an account can also shock your Quality Score. So, you will need to make these changes gradually a few weeks before the new website launches.

Pause your old ads, write new ads

Your old ads with the old website information have a history built up with your keywords. Even if these ads are paused AdWords can still recognize their presence and this can help re-build your Quality Score after a global change. So, instead of changing all of your current ads, you should pause these old ads and upload new ones.

Utilizing AdWords Editor can help you can be methodical and careful in these changes. I use AdWords Editor for almost everything so anytime you’re making a global change, this is the way to do it.

Increase bids a few days before the launch

Let me say this: I don’t believe in haphazardly throwing money at a PPC problem. That’s not how I roll. But if you can anticipate a short term drop in ad position after the website switch, you can preemptively increase your rankings before the change.

Those are a few tactics you can employ before launching the global change in your account. When you launch your new site your performance will dip as the account re-adjusts to the changes. The decreased ad position and performance should be short term, but here a few things  you can do help your account gain back its Quality Score and overall volume:

Conduct keyword research

If you find that you need more search volume, conduct keyword research in order to add new terms. You can do this before the launch as well.

Temporarily increase keyword bids

Stop griping. Of course you don’t want to increase your CPC, but this tactic can help. If you drop in ad position and you need to increase volume, this is a great way to do it. Also, temporarily increasing bids can help enhance your click-through rate. Keep in mind that Google is smart. Google takes into account increased bids simply to improve ad position and CTR. Raising bids can help increase your ad position and gain back some of your lost traffic. But this change won’t necessarily improve your Quality Score (that will take time to heal).

Have patience

And then it just takes time for your account to acclimate to the big changes you’ve been making. This means that time heals all wounds. AdWords will eventually begin to look normal again.

Keep in mind that you don’t want to panic and restructure your account and make even more major changes in order to fix your performance right away. These will be more alterations that AdWords will have to review and acclimate to and this can make the healing process take even longer!

Unfortunately, I can’t predict exactly when you’re account will be back to its old self. This process usually takes a few weeks, at least. This is where the patience part and the setting of proper expectations comes into play.

So, when should you start panicking because your performance isn’t picking back up? That’s a good question. If things aren’t starting to pick back up around the three week mark, you should contact your Google Representative to make sure everything with the account is solid. But this will be different for each account.

These challenges shouldn’t deter you from launching a new website, but you should know what to expect when you make a big change to your PPC account (like altering all of your ads at once).

If you’ve missed our plethora of other articles on the AdWords Quality Score, I will give you a quick review of how a keyword’s Quality Score is established. The key factor that determine a keyword’s relevancy, and this indicates to Google how to rank a given keyword, is its click-through rate. The higher the click-through rate (on the search network), the better your Quality Score will be. Keep in mind, there are numerous other factors that comprise your overall AdWords Quality Score, but an individual keyword’s Quality Score is majorly determined by its click-through rate.

This is why I needed to find out how my new keywords were assigned a Quality Score before I accrued even one impression, much less a click-through rate. After some research and placing a call to my AdWords Representative, I came up an answer that all PPC managers should consider when loading new keywords.

The moment you load a keyword into AdWords, it receives a Quality Score. This initial Quality Score is determined by each keyword’s performance history for other advertisers. Google AdWords has monitored this keyword’s historical performance for multiple advertisers who have targeted this keyword, Google determines an aggregate score and this is your “base score.” This is your keyword’s starting point in regards to Quality Score.

From here, your fate is your own. If your keyword performance is better than the historical average, then your Quality Score will improve. However, if your keyword’s click-through rate is lower than this “base score” then your Quality Score will begin to decline.

What can we take away from this information?

Better keyword targeting: If you load a series of new keywords and they all have a low Quality Score, then you may want to re-think these additions. This is because other advertisers have not had success with these keywords. On the other side of the coin, if the Quality Score for a keyword is 9 or 10, this means that previous and current advertisers are having success with this keyword, and competition could be more fierce. You may want to give this keywords special attention and place them into their own ad groups.

Deeper insight into how the Quality Score works: We now know that keywords are working against a base score from the beginning. This means that you need to have a clear strategy for a keyword before it is activated, and a successful keyword launch is crucial from day-one. This doesn’t mean that you can’t optimize your way to an improved score, but you want to get off to the best start possible!

This week we are featuring guest articles from our PPC Hero allies! We requested submissions from our readers and we received excellent responses from some great PPC bloggers! The PPC Hero team will return to our regularly scheduled articles next week. Enjoy!
There.  I said it.  Google Quality Score is overhyped.  Too many people get scared by this nebulous thing called a “quality score,” and think that there’s no way to appease the Great Google Overlords into taking their website off the naughty list.  The reality is that if you’re running a relevant, well organized PPC campaign, you shouldn’t even have to think about your quality score.

So what is this quality score thing, anyway?  In a nutshell, it’s Google’s quantifiable value for several different factors of relevance between your keywords, ad text, and landing page (for more detailed definition, check out the AdWords help file on quality score.  It’s calculated differently for the search and content networks, but just for the sake of argument let’s focus on the search network score for now.

If your keywords are highly relevant to your ad text, your CTR is likely to be pretty good.  That’s one factor of your quality score.  If your landing page is highly relevant to your AdWords keywords and text ads, Google is likely to determine that the page itself has high quality.  There’s another factor in your quality score calculation.  Of course, you should be paying attention to all of this relevance anyway, since relevance tends to be one of the main distinctions between poor-performing accounts and top-performing ones.  The main point is that if users don’t find what you’re offering relevant to what they want, then they simply aren’t going to buy from you, fill out your lead form, or perform some other conversion action.  You should be paying attention to relevance in your account, regardless of whether or not you care about Google’s arbitrary quality score.

So why do people get so worked up about their quality scores?  My theory is that it’s slightly comforting to get a “grade” on how you’re doing in your AdWords account.  With so many different numbers and statistics flying around in your account, it’s easy to focus on one specific number to determine how things are going.  Remember this, though: <strong>quality score is not indicative of the “quality” of your account</strong>.  The only real “score” you need is one (or all) of these three: total conversions, conversion rate, and cost per conversion.  Notice the theme?  Do yourself a favor and focus on what you’re getting out of your AdWords account, not some meaningless number that’s automatically portioned out by the GoogleBot.

Guest blogger bio: Shawn Livengood is an internet marketing professional based in Austin, Texas.  He is currently pursuing his master’s degree in Information Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin.  Check out his blog at www.ppcwithoutpity.com.

Before I break into why account structure is important, I’ll recap the basics of a well optimized PPC account. There are 4 components: Campaigns, Ad Groups, Keywords and Ad Texts. Each play an integral role in the overall performance of your account and your account’s structure. Campaigns are the big rocks, and they house all of the other components. Ad groups come second, though they have a pretty big role in containing your keywords and ad texts. The practice of optimizing your account structure is really all about organization of data. You can read more on how to optimize your account structure here. Now on to why it’s so important!

Account Management

When managing a pay-per-click account, you want to make things as logical (and simple) as possible. Your account structure can help you to streamline your management duties. Consider this, the majority of your account settings are located at the campaign level. This includes settings for the Content Network, Geo-Targeting, Budget and a host of others. This is most relevant to budget settings. If you have only a single campaign, you have only a single budget – and very little control over the individual sections of your advertising. If you have created a well thought-out and tightly themed account structure, you will be able to manage these settings with ease (and set a separate budget for each campaign).

On a more practical note, your account structure will save you time. Just imagine that you have a single campaign and 50 or heck, a 100 ad groups. Now try to imagine yourself actually going through your daily management routine. Makes you cringe doesn’t it? When you have a great account structure, it’s simple to navigate through your campaigns and ad groups to find what you’re looking for.

Ease of Reporting

A great account structure will make reporting easier. Period. For many of the same reasons management is made easier with optimized structure, reporting becomes simpler as well. When you have 100′s of keywords stuffed into a single ad group, or worse yet, 100s of ad groups stuffed into a single campaign, reporting becomes a nightmare. If you need data for only a select few keywords, you will have to do a lot of manual data manipulation to drill down on the data you need. Your optimized account structure will enable you to quickly and efficiently plot trending graphs for your campaigns and ad groups – providing meaningful data (because your campaigns and ad groups are tightly themed).

Targeting Ads for Searchers

More than anything else, a great account structure allows you to create uber-targeted ad texts. How you structure your account actually informs your ability to write targeted ads. This is the holy grail of PPC account optimization. The trick is to create as detailed ad groups as possible. If your campaign is “Shoes” and you sell blue, red and tennis shoes – you should have three ad groups, “Blue Shoes”, “Red Shoes”, and “Tennis Shoes.” Based on this example, you will be able to write ads that are pin-point targeted. In the “Blue Shoes” ad group, your keywords will be direct variations of “blue shoes.” So you will have no other choice than to write ad texts with the keyword, “blue shoes.” Unless you’re completely missing the point! Conversely, if you had taken the “Shoes” campaign and only created one ad group that targeted blue, red and tennis shoes – you’re ads will not write themselves. You will have to choose which keywords you target and risk losing potential customers who were displayed an irrelevant ad text.

Quality Score

All of this leads to Quality Score, the 800 pound gorilla in the room. When most people write on optimizing for account structure, they take the Quality Score angle – and that’s a fair approach because it is SO IMPORTANT! Because your account structure informs your ability to write targeted ads, account structure is inextricably associated with click-through rate… and thus, Quality Score. I don’t want to sound like I’m skimping on the details, but I’ll leave you with this: improve (optimize) your PPC account structure and you’ll improve your Quality Score.

There’s nothing like training a new employee to see a tried and true PPC staple through refreshed eyes. But it was a good reminder to think through the reasons why PPC account structure is so important.

Let me know your thoughts – why do you feel an optimized PPC account structure is so important?

Some advertisers using AdWords conversion tracking mistakenly believe that they should set an easy conversion event on their landing pages to artificially boost their conversion rates.  In reality, this will not actually have any effect on your Quality Scores, says the Google blog.

What does affect your PPC Quality Score is the click-through rate (CTR).  Google’s goal is to increase relevant websites to match with people’s searches. The higher your click-through rate is, the more relevant your site is to a user’s search. And that’s how Google makes their money; the more clicks an advertiser gets, the more they pay Google. So, if you really want to work on improving your Quality Score, then try to increase your click-through rates.

The best way to improve your click-through rates is to be sure your testing your ads.  Below are some fairly common tips advertisers use to increase their click-through rates, all of which I have used and are proven successful:

1.        Be sure to set your campaign settings for Ad Delivery to “Rotate” and not “Optimize.” The optimize setting automatically chooses the best ad for you without testing other ads in your ad group.

2.       Be sure to have more than 1 ad in each and every ad group.  In some cases I have 4 to 5 ads running with different messages so I can test which message is most effective.

3.       Be sure to separate out your keywords into highly targeted, very distinct ad groups. This will help you write better ads according to the few keywords in your ad group.

4.       Be sure to add your keyword in your display URL. This can sometimes create an additional bold text in your ad and can add another keyword that will catch the user’s eye. Example, www.Shoes.com/NikeShoes

5.       Try to capitalize the first letter of each word in your ad. Some people don’t do this and it might help your ad stand apart from your competitors.

6.       When deciding which ad to pause or keep, be sure you are giving the ad enough time and clicks to accurately determine a winner or loser.

7.       With the economy in a recession, more and more people are only buying if there is a special deal or promotion going on. Use words like ‘Discount’, ‘Inexpensive’, ‘Outlet’ or even ‘Cheap’ if those words do describe your products. Remember though, in order to qualify your traffic, and don’t give any false impressions in your ad that a user won’t find true on your site. Example, if you’re selling high end musical instruments, using the word ‘cheap’ probably isn’t’ the way to go.  In addition to, if your site is having any promotional offers like free shipping or 20% off sales, be sure to say that in your ads.

These are just a few common ways to help increase your click-through rates to in turn increase your Quality Score. As always, PPCHero is your number one source for all things PPC! Check out our other blogs that help you write and test new ads to increase your click-through rates.