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Adwords is not a static service that holds keyword lists and displays your ad in the exact position you believe you are paying for. Aside from the “blind” auction environment you and your competitors are in, a major factor that influences the price you pay per click, or the position of your ad for a given price, is the Adwords Quality Score.
Mastering the quality score is essential if you want to reduce click spend but maintain or even increase sales or leads. Always assume the competition are doing just this – it’s more than possible that the guy in the ad position above you may be pay less per click than you, meaning his budget is going much further than yours in generating sales.
Google defines the Adwords Quality Score as
“...a dynamic variable assigned to each of your keywords. It's calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query”
Behind this is a formula, or formulas, that cover these areas:
a) Minimum bid
b) Ad position
c) Eligibility & position on the content network
At GoldLadder improving the quality score is an instinctive part of our Pay Per Click Management approach. After all, it’s not an obscure, technical function of adwords, its common sense when building and managing an Adwords campaign that delivers great ROI. It’s also a way to create a logical and target-orientated campaign that can be altered in different areas without affecting overall results.
These are the areas within your campaign that influence the quality score formula, and the best practises associated with each area.
The keyword’s click-through rate. Are users responding well to the ad? It has to be relevant & compelling, but also accurately describe the product users will be met with after the click through. Keep testing and running multiple variants of your ads in the adgroup, find the best ad and then repeat the process again.
Relevance of keywords to ads in the group. An ideal amount of keywords within an ad group is between 15 to 25. They should be very closely linked to the wordage in your ad copy. For example, “red flowers” and “crimson flowers” would be covered in two separate ad groups.
The quality of your landing page. As with the above, your landing page is an extension of your chosen keywords and ads for that group. Be prepared to create a page that follows the relevance closely as Adwords will scan your page looking for titles, descriptions and meta data that tallies with your ad and keyword data. It’s also worth mentioning that page load speed and performance compared to your server’s geographical average is taken into account – cheap hosting can be false economy!
Content performance. The quality score looks across performance on relevant websites to determine the ad's eligibility to appear on a particular content site, as well as the ad's position on that site. Again, keep the click through rate and relevancy in top condition to achieve better and more cost effective content placements.
Naturally, there are further hidden areas, and Google forever tweak the formulas for the quality score in adwords, but the core principles remain the same.
If you would like to know just how to your campaign might benefit from GoldLadder’s improvement of quality score issues, please feel free to contact us – we’d love to help.
