For a lot of new advertisers to pay per click advertising, they may have got the impression that the best way to rank high is through adopting a high cost per click (CPC) for the keyword they are targeting. However, in extremely competitive markets, the CPC can continually rise through different advertisers bidding on the same keyword. Therefore, although you might value traffic at, say, $10/lead, it could cost you $50 just to compete against everyone else in PPC. The main reason this is the case is because of a variable in PPC called the quality score. In this article, I’ll briefly go into what the quality score is with a few ways to improve it.
 

Quality Score Defined

The quality score is a PPC-specific variable which determines an adverts ranking and CPC. The higher the quality score, the easier it is to get a higher ranking or a lower CPC for the same ranking as before. It is affected by the click through rate of your advert, your landing page and your advert’s relevance to the keyword targeting.
The reason the quality score was introduced was to satisfy an objective of Google as a company on the whole: to make the user experience for people surfing online better. Just because a billion dollar company has tons of money to rank #1 in paid search for PPC does not necessarily mean that it is the best advert and the most relevant advert for the web user to view and engage with first. The quality score levels out the playing field so that the best adverts appear at the top. Paid search results rank was deemed to only be affected by CPC predominantly. However, the quality score makes just as big an impact to ranking, in some aspect, as the CPC you adopt.
 
 

3 Tips to Improve Quality Score

From the above explanation, it makes it clear that we all want for our campaigns to have the highest possible quality score possible, since it will provide better results, more traffic or a reduced cost. For this reason, here are three tips you can implement to help to improve your quality score:

1. Increaes your advert’s CTR:
   1. Include a call to action in the title
   2. Add an ad extension to increase the area your advert takes up in paid search results. This will help to improve engagement and potentially push competitor adverts below the fold of the web page.
   3. Use 1-2 power words.
2. Make your advert keyword-rich:
   1. Your advert should contain the keyword/s that you are targeting the search phase at least 1-2 times. One of the best ways to add extra keywords is through creating a spider diagram of relevant adverts to what you are targeting, including 2-4 of them in your advert.
3. Improve landing page relevance:
   1. Your landing page has to continue from where your advert left of. This is why homepages do not really work well in PPC since they reduce the quality score of the campaign from not being specifically relevant. Having a dedicated landing page that is specific to the ad campaign will help to improve your quality score, making sure it contains keywords for the area you are promoting.