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.
