Anyone that has used Google AdWords will agree that quality score plays an important role in every campaign.  The quality score that your campaign receives will determine the minimum price you pay per click for your keywords. You can be awarded a score from 1 to 10. The higher quality score you get the lower your minimum bid will be.

Quality score is affected by a number of factor including:

• Campaign structure
• Landing page quality
• Macro factor

So lets take a look at each of those factors in a bit more detail.

Campaign Structure

The way you structure your campaign will play an important role to what quality score you will be rewarded. Here are a few tips on how to boost your campaign quality score.

1. Have separate ad groups for your keywords – this is actually very important and it will not only boost your quality score but your campaign CTR and your conversion rate. Google recommends having 5-10 keywords within a single ad group. However i personally think that if you create an ad group for each individual keyword you will get much better results because you can have a highly relevant ad. So why not start by breaking your keywords into smaller groups and writing a specific ad for each group of keywords. If you want to be really fancy make 1 keyword per ad group.

2. Keyword relevancy – it is important to understand that your keywords need to be specific and closely related to what you offer on your website. The broader terms you use the lower your quality score will be. Lets take a look at this example.

If you are selling ‘nokia mobile phones’:

Nokia N93 mobile phone – will  be a great keyword and would probably get a great quality score of above 6

mobile phone – will be a decent keywords and will probably get an ok quality score of 5-6

phones - will be a bad keyword choice and will most likely get a poor quality score.

So focus on keywords that are highly relevant don’t go off target. My recommendation is to look for brand specific and long-tail keywords.

3. Write good ad copies - specific keyword reach ad copies with call to action tend to get a good quality score due to the high CTR that they achieve. So make specific ads for your products include the keywords in your ads and use call to action and you will see the difference yourself.

4. Use negative keywords within your campaign – this will help you not only get better CTR but will also increase the quality of your traffic and hence your conversion rate.

Landing page quality

The landing page that you have in place will also play an important role in the quality score that you will be awarded. It is important to get some things right in order to be scored highly by Google’s bots.

1.Landing page loading time - it is important to make sure that you page loading time is low. For those of you who don’t know load time is the time a user has to wait once he has clicked on your ads for the page to be displayed in his browser. In my opinion i think the landing page time should be from 1sec to a maximum of 10secs (and thats pushing it). In the end of the day you are not going to wait for too long when you got a see of choices. The competition is only one click away.

2.Page relevancy – I can stress enough how important it is to have relevant content that matches your keywords and ads. You need to provide the user with the information that you promised in the ads. If you have a product or service that you offer but don’t have relevant information on your site. Just don’t advertise it.

3.Unique content - The content that you offer on your site needs to be unique. Don’t in any circumstance use copied product descriptions from your competitors not only that is not going to be read by the consumer but also Google hates that for both PPC and SEO. Original content is a must.

4. Good Navigation – Make it easy for users to find what they need on your site. Navigation must be perfect as a rule of thumb i recommend that your user should be able to get to what he needs in no more than 3 clicks. Also don’t make him use the browser buttons. Make the navigation intelligent yet simple.

5.Security – something that can ruin your camping is potentially is harmful software for the visitors. This will take your campaign down for months so make sure your website is protect properly.

Here you can find detailed information about website quality guidelines from Google AdWords.

Macro Factor

Its called macro because this is the factors that impact quality score which you can’t control.

One of the main factors here is the statistical data that Google AdWords gathers about other peoples campaigns for certain keywords. If a lot of people had a poor quality score for a certain keyword and you decide to use it in your campaign initially it will also have a poor quality score. However as your campaign evolves over time this might change if you get a good click through rate for the particular search term.

Conclusion

Quality score is an important formula that is used to calculate the minimum bids for your keywords. Even though AdWords has not reviled all factors that impact quality score if you use all the suggestions above I am confident that you will achieve fantastic results for your campaign.

I hope this article will help you improve your results drastically. If you want to find out more ways in which you can improve your Google AdWords campaign why not try one of our free Adwords performance reports or give us a call on 0203 137 1048.

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