Kuka Studios

So what is meant by quality score?

According to Google:
The AdWords system calculates a ‘Quality Score’ for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).

To read the full Google help article, click here

The quality score will affect what your minimum bid is, where your placement will be and even if you are legible to show at all.

Why should we care?
As with all marketing we are measured on maximum return for minimum expenditure, by optimising your Google adwords account you can reduce your CPC and with the use of bespoke landing pages potentially increase your conversion rate. The great thing about Google adwords is that this can be implemented and assessed very quickly.

Where to begin?
There are so many things that we can go into right now such as:
- how to set up and structure a Google campaign
- top tips for optimising ad copy
- what elements make the best landing pages
- final optimisation tips to squeeze the last of your budget

For now my main aim is to briefly tell you how to improve your quality score and each of the points mentioned above will be covered in future posts.

So let’s begin, Google’s mantra is “relevancy”. Whether it is SEO or PPC you are reading up on, this keyphrase comes across again and again and who can blame them. There is nothing more annoying than having precious online time wasted by misleading adverts and mismatched websites. When we search for something we know what we want and we are already part of the way along the conversion path. At this stage if we can give the user something relevant we increase our conversion rates and overall reputation. Google has the right idea here and if we follow their guidelines and recommendations we will ultimately save ourselves money and increase our conversion rates.

So let’s look at the top tips for increasing the relevancy of our ads.

Targeted Advertising

Ad Group Structure
Think of all the product groups or categories you wish to promote and use these as the basis for your ad groups. Being specific rather than general with your setup will save you money but will also increase your relevancy and therefore your quality score. You should aim for creating groups targeted at specific products, these should contain 15-20 related keyphrases.

Ad Copy
Use your top key phrases in your title and copy. Try and have your display url contain your keyphrase. From experience, PPC and most online marketing campaigns benefit from using bespoke landing pages that are optimised for lead conversion or for sales. (This is covered fully in another post). In the case of Adwords quality score it also helps if these are named in such a way that they contain the key phrase as part of the file name / URL.

Bespoke Landing Pages
Use bespoke landing pages that target the keyphrases that you are using in your targeted ad group. Amend your meta tags to include your ad copy, ensure that you have H1 tags that reflect your ad or keyphrases. Rewrite your content to include many of the phrases you are using. Ensure this landing page loads quickly. It is beneficial if you also include a privacy policy link on this page.

Adgroup History
Now you have to wait for your ads to build their history. The more clicks you receive the more data is built up about your account and you will grow in rankings, history and quality.

I feel like I have only touched the tip of the iceberg with the methods above. There are so many finer details to implementing and optimising Adwords which will take too much time to go into just now, but even though this is just an overview I think we need a conclusion of sorts.

Conclusion

This approach is taken with all clients but one that stood out was a Dental company. Their existing ad structure was scattered and unfocused, they were spending an obscene amount of money with very little return. As part of the optimisation process which also included restructuring, keyword analysis, copy writing, analytics, landing page optimisation and maintenance we specifically set out to increase quality score. This had been down in the 1/10 to 3/10 range, they were pointing all destination URLs to their home page which was not keyword rich and didn’t mention their services, the page had no relation to the advert or the services offered.

We took the approach mentioned above:
We identified the low quality keywords and put these into their own seperate groups. We wrote content specifically for these targeted services and pointed them to bespoke landing pages e.g. teeth whitening manchester, etc.

The performance had a quick turn around with the quality score jumping from 1/10 to 9/10 and even 10/10 within a couple of weeks. As the history grew we were able to reduce our bids without losing our position and because the landing pages were so relevant to the search terms conversions went up as expected. Overall the budget was halved, the conversion rate tripled and we could re-use the budget to expand the service groups further.

If you need more help or advice with your Google Adwords, feel free to contact us