For many businesses, Google Ads offers an opportunity to reach new customers and effectively market their businesses online. Not only can advertisers target the exact keyphrases that they want to be found for, they can also show the most relevant text and direct customers to the right page on their site. It’s no wonder that Google Ads is such a popular platform with businesses looking to drive more traffic to their sites.
In PPC it’s important to balance the amount you pay for your clicks with the returns that you get from your website. If you’re paying too much for your traffic then you could end up in a position where you are seeing a negative return on your investment. One of the simplest ways to make sure you’re paying as little as possible for your clicks is to concentrate on improving your keyword quality score.
Google’s description of quality score is “quality score is an estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords and landing pages.” Quality score is determined by three factors which are: click-through rate, relevancy and landing page. Measured on a scale from 1 to 10 the higher your quality score the better your adverts are likely to perform and the lower your click costs. Luckily for most advertisers, there are things that you can do to improve your keyword quality scores.
Advert relevancy – Your adverts need to be relevant to the keywords that you are targeting. Having one advert for all your different keywords is a sign that you have some work to do. Ideally, you should split your campaign into highly relevant ad groups with each one containing closely matched keywords. You can then use these keywords in your advert to help make the adverts more relevant to your search terms.
Click through rate – The higher your advert positioning and the more relevant your advert the better your click-through rate. One way to increase your advert positioning is by bidding more on your keywords but if you can make your adverts and keywords more relevant then you’ll also get better advert positioning. A bid increase should only be used as a short-term option while you work to improve your keyword quality scores.
Landing page – Another important factor is how relevant your landing page is to your advert and keywords. Let’s say that you are targeting keywords related to “Nike running shoes” but are sending these visitors to your website homepage, this will result in you getting a below average landing page quality score. Simply changing your landing page to a filtered results page that shows all of your Nike running shoes will improve the relevancy and your landing page score. The more relevant the page is to your keywords and adverts the higher your quality score will be.
Not only is quality score a great way to help reduce your click costs but it will also help you get more from your advertising spend as you focus on making your adverts more relevant for your customers.