It makes you feel frustrated when you see your competitors are edging past your ads on Google adwords and no matter how many changes you make, things don’t improve much. Most people believe ranking in Google Adwords is easy but it is far from the truth. Since the competition is fierce now, you simply can’t reach the top by including high search volume keywords randomly. Nope, you need to have a plan and the plan is to improve the Quality Score.
When it comes to placing online ads, especially for PPC management, it’s all about Quality Score. What’s a Quality Score, you might ask? For those who don’t know, a Quality score is a rating created by a Google algorithm and given to your ad campaign based on the keywords you’ve used and your PPC ads.
The Quality Score your paid search marketing campaign is given matters, because it will determine the placement of your ads in search engine rankings and their cost. And everyone wants lower prices and better ad positions. Quality Scores are graded on a scale from 1 to 10. A QS of 7 is above average, and a QS of 2 or lower might not qualify to be shown at all.
So what can you do to improve your Quality Score? Other than the big and obvious tactics – creating original and quality content– there are a few things you can do to improve your Quality Score strategy.
Maintain high relevancy by targeting smaller ad groups
You can’t pack all of your keywords into one ad, and you shouldn’t want to. Set up your campaign to have many smaller, more specific target groups, and use the keywords that apply to each of them specifically. This will not only give you a high degree of relevancy in your keyword usage – which is hugely important when you’re dealing with the current Google algorithms – but it will be highly relevant for your audiences as well. Win-win! So remember: keep the number of keywords per ad low, the variety of your ads high.
Keep your campaign strategy organised
When dividing your ad campaigns into smaller, targeted groups, it helps to put them into logical themes. Divide products and services. Think branded, or non-branded. Whatever groupings help you keep your ad groups and campaign as a whole focused. It also helps to keep a list of negative keywords somewhere as an avoidance reminder.
And most of all, take the time to plan and organise your campaign in the very beginning. If you have a logical plan with steps and structure, with room to be flexible and expand, your campaign will run more efficiently and get you the results you want.
Make sure to tie your keywords, ad copy and landing page content together for relevance
Okay, so you’re using just the right amount of keywords in your ad campaigns, and keeping them focused. But what about the corresponding ad copy? Does that ad copy in turn reflect and align with the content on your landing page? In order to get a good QS, and have a good ad campaign in general, it’s important to maintain keyword relevance across all aspects of your ads and website.
That way, not only will you get a better QS and a higher degree of visibility online, but visitors to your site will have a better and more streamlined experience as well, which will lead to higher conversion rates.
