It’s been almost two years now that Google & Yahoo have implemented their quality score and quality index algorithms. Hopefully by now, you’ve implemented some changes in your account that can improve your quality score, which can increase your ad positions while decreasing your maximum bid amount. In this post I’d like to share with you some changes that I have made in my accounts that have improved my quality scores and have given me a lower CPC yet remained in the same or higher ad positions.
- Break down your ad groups!!! First and foremost, organize your ad groups into smaller, more targeted ad groups. This is the cream of the crop in achieving a better quality score. By breaking down your campaigns and ad groups into smaller ad groups (meaning fewer keywords in each ad group) it allows you to write more relevant ads for a select number of keywords in your ad group. Google and Yahoo both say that by including your keywords in your ad title and descriptions will greatly help increase your quality scores.At one time I had a rather large campaign of cake topper keywords. The keywords ranged from personalized to cheap to vintage and novelty cake toppers. I took the campaign and created several new ad groups within Google Adwords Editor for each different type of cake topper. This allowed me to write ads that included a specific keyword in my ad title and description that would be more targeted and relevant to the end user. Now I have about 20 different ad groups in this one campaign, but they are all as targeted as possible to the user, and that’s my end goal. Because my keywords, ads and landing page are completely targeted and relevant to each other, I have a ‘great’ quality score on most keywords and my conversions and click-through rates have increased. Once I was finished creating all my new ad groups within Adwords Editor, I then used the 3rd party converter tool in Yahoo to copy and paste my Google campaign into Yahoo.
- Ad text display settings. In both Google and Yahoo the default settings for ad display are set to optimize, which always displays the better performing ad. What you want to do is set your ad display settings to rotate in Google and set the Yahoo optimize ad display to off. This allows you to actually test your ads. Why is testing your ads important? Click-through rates are a determining factor in quality score. So if you have two ads you are running, and they both have a low click-through rate, and you’re not testing new ads, then you can never achieve a higher click-through rate. Google and Yahoo will simply always display the higher of the two, even if it’s a low CTR!There are many resources of ways to test your ads to achieve not only a higher click-through rate but higher conversion rates as well.
- Keyword and ad text relevancy. Google & Yahoo both want to reward advertisers when they deliver the most targeted and relevant ads to users. That’s really the main point of all this quality score talk. So by including your main keywords in both the title and description of your ad text is not something you should overlook or disregard. That’s why breaking down your ad groups into smaller, more targeted ad groups with fewer keywords is so important. You’ll have fewer variations of keywords that you would need to include in your ad text. One step you can take over adding keywords in your ad text manually is using the dynamic keyword insertion feature. This allows the advertiser to dynamically insert the keyword into the ad text which will be the most relevant to what the user has typed in the search box. When using dynamic keyword insertion be careful, if you don’t use it correctly it can make your ad’s wording read a little funky.
So there you have it, my best advice on generating a higher quality score in both Google & Yahoo. These tips can obviously be used in any other search engine, and should! Having a good quality score can really help your business achieve its goals by increasing traffic, conversions and hopefully sales!
