Who Else Wants Kick-Ass AdWords Quality Score?

Posted by Pete - 23/06/08 at 01:06:59 pm

Having great quality score can lower your costs per click (and by proxy, increase ROI), lower your bounce rate and increase conversions. How so? Because making changes to boost your quality score will generally mean making your site better. However, it’s not a particularly easy thing to do.

What is Quality Score?

Google defines quality score as:

?…the basis for measuring the quality and relevance of your ads and determining your minimum CPC bid for Google and the search network. To encourage relevant and successful ads within AdWords, our system defines a Quality Score to set your keyword status, minimum CPC bid, and ad rank for the ad auction?.

…and it gives you a good one based on:

The ads historical CTR on Google, the display URL and it’s “relatedness” to the keyword
The ads previous performance on the relevant (and related/similar) site(s)
Keyword relevance relative to the ads in its ad group
Landing page quality
How good you are (measured on the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account)
Historical CTR of the ads in the ad group
Landing page load times

Which is all very well and good, but that doesn’t really tell you what you need to have a good one. So to save you thousands of hours testing and experimenting to find what works best, here’s our guide to getting a quality score that kicks ass.

Improving Your Quality Score: Building a Better Campaign

I’ll be doing a full post on how to build an awesome campaign structure when setting up from scratch in the near future, but for now we’re only interested in the bits that affect quality score. With that in mind, here’s how you do it:

Keep your keyword groups focused

I’ve seen countless examples where people will create a group called “products” or something similar, and then lump in every keyword known to man. Instead, keep things tight. Have a group for blue widgets, and the 15-20 keywords that relate to them, one for red widgets with the keywords for that product, one for white widgets and so on. Get laser-targeted with what you’re bidding on.

Keep your ad copy focused

Again, people are far too quick to rely on DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion) rather than actually doing things properly. DKI is fine, but make sure you’re using it where appropriate, or you can end up with some serious gaffs. Instead, actually write some proper ad copy, making sure that you get whatever the main keyword focus for that group is appears in the text in the title, description and URL.

Be a “glass half empty” kinda person

Or to put it another way, be negative. Use your analytics to see which terms your ads are showing for that aren’t producing the goods. Negative keywords will help you filter those out. Common ones to put in are “free”, “sample”, “try”, “test” and other such terms.

Test the keyword matching options

Rather than phrase-matching all the time, mix it up a bit. Try using exact and broad match to see what that does for you. Exact (provided you’ve got a relevant keyword) will generally give the best quality score, but at the expense of getting traffic from variations. Test to see what gives the best ROI.

Improving Your Quality Score: Crafting Better Landing Pages

Again, I’ll be doing a full post on what you want to be doing to create killer landing pages soon, but this will just be a short piece on sorting out the quality score elements.

Title, description, URL and robots

Firstly, set up a folder for all your landing pages to sit in. Then, in your robots.txt file, add the following lines:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /ppc-landing-pages/

User-agent: AdsBot-Google
Allow: /ppc-landing-pages/

That will stop anything other than the AdWords quality score bot from accessing those pages. That way, you won’t lose quality score, but you also won’t risk having pages that look like over-optimised spam that could get you penalised. Now make sure every landing page has a name that relates to the keywords in the ad group that target it, and also make sure the title tag is targeted to that group. Don’t go overboard, but make sure it’s there. Finally, set the meta description as whatever the best performing piece of ad copy is.

Target your ad copy

Use the Site-Related Keywords Tool to make sure the copy on your page is in keeping with what Google thinks it should be. That way, you won’t be in for any nasty surprises later on, and have to re-do all your copy.

Code properly

Now that page load time is a factor, you’re going to want to stay away from dynamically generated pages. Instead, have your CMS cache every landing page that a person generates, and output it as a real HTML file somewhere. That way, you can create lots of pages dynamically in a short amount of time, but have proper HTML there when the bot comes along, with no SSIs or dynamic scripts running to slow things down. If you want to go completely bonkers with this, it’s also worth learning how browsers actually load pages, so you can lay out your pages in a more spider-friendly fashion.

Split test your landing pages

Use the orthogonal array spreadsheet tool to conduct large scale multi-variate split tests on your landing pages. Refine them over time, and you’ll see that make a difference too.

Abracadabra

It’s incredible what a difference putting all this into play can make. I’ve seen CPCs drop to 10% what they were pre-optimisation. I’ve seen conversion rates increase 500% as a result of putting this stuff into practice. This is real, serious PPC optimisation, not just something Google put in to piss you off. So take the bull by the horns and sort out your campaigns today.

If you think we’ve missed anything, or you want something explained further, let us know in the comments below.

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