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Google Confirms Conversion Rates Have No Effect on Quality ScorePosted by Amber on December 3, 2008 in Google AdWords Quality Score |
According to the Google Adwords Agency Blog, your account conversion rate does not affect your account Quality score. While some of you may already know this, apparently there are many others that don’t. And some of these people are actually implementing conversion codes on their site to track easy conversions just to try and increase their Quality Score.
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.
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December 4th, 2008 at 8:15 am
If you’re optimising your campaign to a CPA figure, is it still advisable to set the ad delivery to “rotate” rather than “optimise” or does this have no effect?
December 4th, 2008 at 8:47 am
Hi Ian, yes, you should absolutely still set your ad delivery to rotate over optimize so you can test which ads will deliver the best conversion rates. At that point, instead of pausing ads with a low CTR, I would only pause ads with the lowest conversion rate.
December 4th, 2008 at 8:54 am
Hi Amber – nice summary of the factors that DO affect Quality Score! I always wondered when/if Google would come out and say if conversion rates would be counted. Glad they decided not to include this factor, because as they say themselves, people could try and game the system with an easy conversion action. I submitted your post to Stumbleupon because I thought it was a great summary.
December 4th, 2008 at 9:10 am
Thanks Amber, I’ll give it a go.
December 4th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Great Info, I often wondered if it effected quality score.
Good to get an answer.
December 4th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Andrew and Asia – Thanks so much! I too am glad they finally came out with it. Why are people always trying to game the system? : ) Thanks for reading!
December 4th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Why test 4-5 ads? Do only 2-3 and have real goood CTR and dump the non performing ones?
December 4th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Hi Joey, I like to test as many ads as I can come up with new verbiage. Not to go overboard of course, you do’nt need 7 or more ads running necessarily. But I do a lot of A/B split testing where I have two identical ads running, but only one word or one call to action is changed, and see which one performs best. Then I’ll know to stick with that one call to action throughout all of my ads if it performs better than the rest.
December 4th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
[...] you are one of those folks who thinks your conversion rate has an impact on the Quality Score of your Google AdWords campaign, you may want to read a post over at The Adventures of PPC Hero [...]
December 4th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
@ Joey
As Amber said test to find the best performing ad but always keep testing. Once you’ve gotten rid of the least performing ad through up another one to see if you can top the previous better one. Test, Test, Test- it’s hard to go wrong.