Improving Quality Score in Google AdWords
If you want to run a successful Google AdWords campaign, you must pay attention to the quality score of each of your keywords. Not only does it affect the positioning of your ads in Google (see Figure 1), but a higher quality score also lowers your costs-per-click (CPC) and delivers greater exposure and conversion.
What is Quality Score?
In order to determine how relevant your ads, keywords and landing pages are to a person who will see your ads, Google assigns a quality score to each keyword (1 being lowest, 10 being highest). In other words, your quality score reflects how good of a user experience your keyword provides. The more relevant your ad, the higher your quality score. The higher your quality score, the better positioning your ad receives and the less you pay for CPC.
You can see why improving your quality score is important to getting more of your ads in front of customers and – even better – getting them to buy your products or services.
How to Improve Google AdWords Quality Score
Improving your quality score isn’t rocket science, but it does require some commitment of your time. Luckily, we’ve assembled a few tips to help you get in there and make the most of it.
Check your Adwords quality scores. It’s easier to know where you need to go if you understand where you are starting, and you can do so by logging in to your Google AdWords account and reviewing the quality scores for each keyword.
Analyze and organize your groups. The more organized your AdWords groups, the better your overall score. If you find that one keyword doesn’t match the rest in the group, create a new group for that specific keyword. Likewise, if you have misspelled keywords mixed in with correctly spelled keywords, then make a separate group for the misspelled words. By differentiating, you can improve the quality scores for both groups.
Create original ad copy for each group. No copycats allowed. Be sure each group has its own, dedicated ad copy. This ensures that the number of keywords per ad group is low, giving you a higher overall quality score.
Insert keywords into your ad copy. Quality score can be significantly improved by placing the keywords from each group within the corresponding ad copy.
Designate a landing page for each group. There doesn’t need to be a separate landing page for every group, but every group should have its own landing page. That being said, try not to assign too many groups to a landing page. Make sure the keywords from the corresponding groups are on the landing page itself, but with no more than 5-10 keywords per page.
Always be testing. In order to understand which ads are converting the best, write two ads for each group so you can compare them. Check the insights on AdWords to see how each is performing, so that you can use the one that boosts quality score the most.
The ultimate goal with any Google AdWords campaign is to be placed in the prestigious 1-3 search results above the organic and local search results. In order to do this, incorporate these tips into your overall strategy for improving quality score and watch as you magically move up the page.
