Julianna
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, particularly Google Adwords, is a bit of a black art. If you know what you are doing it works well, if you don’t it can feel like you’re throwing your money away. Luckily Canada’s own Internet Marketing insider One Degree has a great post on how to increase your pay-per-click quality score.
What is a quality score you ask? According to Google, it is a dynamic variable assigned to each of your keywords:
Quality Score influences your ads’ position on Google and the Google Network. It also partly determines your keywords’ minimum bids. In general, the higher your Quality Score, the better your ad position and the lower your minimum bids. Quality Score helps ensure that only the most relevant ads appear to users on Google and the Google Network. The AdWords system works best for everybody—advertisers, users, publishers, and Google too—when the ads we display match our users’ needs as closely as possible. Relevant ads tend to earn more clicks, appear in a higher position, and bring you the most success.
Google determines your score based on criteria including:
* Click-through rate
* Maximum bid
* Ad text relevance
* Ad performance
* Keyword relevance
* Keyword performance
* Landing page relevance
* Landing page performance
While Google, and other PPC providers such as Yahoo Search Marketing provide you with guidelines to help increase your quality score, it can be difficult to know what works and what doesn’t. This biggest issue is that while you are tweaking your ads trying to get the best performance from them you are still getting charged, so you are paying to play – not always the best feeling if you aren’t sure of the rules. Even small pieces of advice can help you on your way to setting up a great campaign:
A common PPC best practice is to include your keywords in your ad title, ad copy and display URL. A good way to approach this is to use dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) (which is probably a good topic for a future post). In addition to improving your CTR and conversion rate, using keywords in your ad copy will increase your ads relevance to each term. All of these factors can contribute to achieving a better quality score.
This is just part one of David Dougherty’s PPC advice, keep your eyes peeled on One Degree for part two!