If you are running any PPC (Pay Per Click) management campaign you must be aware of Quality Score and the effects on your PPC campaign performance it has. The main purpose of Quality Score is to award those advertisers who are providing the best experience to searchers from keyword query to landing page and not those who have the deepest pockets. If you provide a positive experience for searchers, you will find they, along with Google will reward you.
Quality Score is dynamic and is assigned to both the keyword and Ad Group level. It essentially affects your cost per click which in turn will affect your overall profitability. So for a higher Quality Score, you can achieve a paid search higher ranking at a lower cost per click than your competitors. There are three major factors that we know about that Quality Score is determined by:
- Click Through Rate (CTR) – I don’t care what anybody tell you, CTR is by far the most important factor in your PPC bid management! If you were to pay two people to advertise to for your brick and mortar store. One had a great flashing sign and did magic tricks or another one that just brought people into your store which one would you reward?
- Relevancy – What you PPC ad is related to the keywords with in that Ad Group- So many people confuse this with the keywords you bid on that are within the landing page but that is not what relevancy is about. Let’s use our brick and mortar example again, If one of our people advertising for us has a sign that says “free hamburgers – come on in” how relevant would that be if we do not serve hamburgers or food in general?
- Landing Page – this one you can spend all day with and never come up with a true answer for. I have had many of discussions with clients on this and I can tell you that having a landing page that is on topic with the Ad Group is all you need. Google is the only PPC search engine that even cares about this and their main goal is to make sure that an advertiser has little grounds to claim click fraud. If you are bidding on running shoes make the page about that and other related items such as running clothing and you will be fine.
So with all that said, let’s look at some PPC bid management tips:
Smaller Ad Groups The Better
Keeping your Ad Groups to twenty five keywords or better has always been my sweet spot. Now I know some of you might be cursing me out when you read this as you might have a hundred thousand keywords you are bidding on but the facts are that smaller, targeted Ad Groups will do wonders for you. Your relevancy will be higher and you can offer more landing pages. Examples of typical Ad Groups I use are branded, non-branded, singular, and plurals.
Dynaminc Keyword Insertion Is Your Friend
One of the relevancy factors is relevance of the ad copy to the search query. This is a real time analysis and is not completely reflected in the number that is shown inside your AdWords account.
For DKI to be effective, there are a few things that need to occur:
The ad needs to stand out (if the ads blend into each other, CTR suffers).
The ad has to be attractive to the searcher (poor DKI usage often lowers CTR)
The ads need to be related to the search query (DKI does this automatically by adding the keyword).
Therefore, the use of DKI is more likely to affect you via the CTR factors and not the relevancy factors; however, DKI can definaetly improve QS as well now due to that change in the QS factor.
With DKI, it is useful to write two ads and test them out to see which does better.
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