Google’s Quality Score guidelines for Adwords, designed to weed out publishers who don’t offer something valuable to visitors in return for their “click” by raising the minimum bids they need to pay.
PPC guru Perry Marshall revealed some of his insights on Quality Scoring recently.
Poor quality scores are largely caused:
- Having too many different types of keywords in one Adgroup;
- Having too many different Adgroups pointing to the same landing page;
- Thin (or not easily visible) content;
- Bidding on keywords which have a track record of low relevance ads, and;
- Ads, landing pages and keywords which Google thinks might not be closely related to each other;
As a result, good quality scores are caused by solving these problems – specifically:
You can largely solve these Quality Score problems by:
- Splitting the keywords in your Agroups into smaller groups, and sending underperforming keywords into their own Adgroups (so they don’t drag down the Quality Scores of otherwise good keywords in good Adgroups);
- Better targeted landing pages (ideally, keyword specific landing pages).
- Creating fresh new content for your site (ie – articles, blog posts, backissues of newsletters etc), and making sure the content is easily visible using good internal navigation, or a site-map (get an SEO to help you out here);
- Getting rid of bad keywords (slash out the cancer!);
- And making sure your ads, keywords and landing pages are all closely related.
1. Check your Quality Score
The first thing you want to do is check your Quality Score to find out which ads are (and aren’t) rated well.
It only takes a moment to find your adwords quality score – and it’s all pretty self explanatory. “Great” means your score is great, “OK” means it’s OK, “Poor” means poor. (Quick – someone go tell Dave Pasternack this PPC stuff isn’t rocket science! ;))
Also look at your minimum bid – the lower it is, the better.
Obviously you want as many of your keyword to be listed as “Great” as possible – because quality scores of “Great” are rewarded over quality scores of “Poor” or “OK”.
You’ll probably need scores of “Great” if you want the $0.05 clicks.
Quality scores of “Poor” might see your bids jacked up to $1.00 – or even $10.00!
Just a quick note: You’ll generally receive scores of “Great” when you first start an ad group. However, as Google gathers more data on your advertising, this can change [read:deteriorate] quickly.
2. Find out what Google thinks your landing page is about
Now that you know what your Quality Score is, it’s time to gather another piece of the puzzle – an insight into Google’s “contextual matching” systems…
…What Google thinks your site is about!
It’s a simple trick. You’ll need to open up Google’s Keyword Sandbox and click on the “Site-Related Keywords” tab.
Enter your landing page URL in the box provided and click “Get Keywords“.
Google will spider your page, and report back to you about what it thinks your page is about.
Do it again, but this time tick the box marked “Include other pages on my site linked from this URL“…
– This will give you the keywords that Google thinks your site is about (or at least the pages it can see linked off your landing page).
It’s fair to assume that the systems Google is using here are the same (if not, similar) to the ones the Google Adwords spider-bot uses to determine your site’s relevancy to certain keywords.
If some of the important keywords you’re targeting don’t show up in the list of keywords the Keyword Sandbox tool spits out, then you’re doing something wrong SEO-wise.
If so, go hire an SEO expert who knows what they’re doing when it comes to theming web-sites and web-pages…
…Or (at the very least) make sure your main keywords are mentioned in the page copy.
3. Point to relevant landing pages
This is wise from a Conversion Maximisation perspective – not just from an Adwords Quality Scoring perspective.
Send people to the most appropriate page of your site… the one which best addresses their needs – why they’re searching Google, or what they wanted to receive when they clicked on your ad.
– If there isn’t a particularly relevant page, create one!
It’s smart marketing, and Google will reward you for it.
Review your entire web-site content for relevance
Each “Google Slap” has seen squeeze page and affiliate selling sites hit by the hardest penalties.
This is because the “slaps” don’t just look at the landing page – they look at the overall quality of the site.
You see, the whole theory behind Quality Score is to create some sort of metric which can be used to measuring and rate the expected quality of the experience that a user will have on your web-site.
This number can then be fed into an algorithm so that consumers can be delivered a consistently good experience whenever they click on ads.
It’s part of the Search Engine Utopia:
In a perfect world, the best sort of experience a user could have with a web-site is they click on your ad and bang they’re on the page which provides them the answer they’re looking for…
(Or at least lets them quickly navigate to the page which addresses their specific needs.)
Squeeze-page and affiliate sites don’t generally deliver this – and as a result, they’re disfavoured by Google’s quality scoring.
Normally squeeze-page sites require the user to enter their e-mail address in order to access the information they need – and in Google’s eyes this is an unnecessary hassle, and a sign of a bad user experience.
If your web-site content is very “thin”, follow Perry Marshall’s tips (way above) and upload backissues of your newsletter as it goes out, or write some articles, or start a blog.
Link these pages off your landing page in the footer so that it’s still accessible to Google’s spider, but won’t affect conversion rates… Or, if you’re using long-form copy, put discrete links high in your copy (because Google’s spider seems to download only the first however-many kb of a page, and therefore may not find your links.)
If you don’t know what to write about, run your site through the Keyword Sandbox tool mentioned in point #1 and write on those topics.
6. Subscribe to forums, podcasts and blogs for the latest Adwords news
If you’re doing your own D.I.Y. Adwords Management, it’s worth spending some time each week going through the latest news which pops up on the radar about Adwords.
The information you discover is going to save you money in CPC’s (cost per clicks), and improve your conversion rates – I’m certain of it.
Oh, and finally – do yourself a favour and familiarise yourself with Google’s landing page and site quality guidelines: https://adwords.google.com/select/siteguidelines.html
Google’s not evil – they’re not out to hide information from you – most of the important information you need to know about successfully running an Adwords campaign they give you freely.
Just following their advice, and reading between the lines, will get you 50% of the way there. Blogs (like those above) will give you an extra 10% kick. The remaining 40% comes down to testing
Source: www.brenthodgson.com