How to Increase Adwords Quality Score

A higher Quality Score will help you pay less for each click on your ad as well as help you gain higher rankings than your competition.

Google introduced the Quality Score in order to keep spammers out of the top results and enable the advertisers who follow Google’s guidelines to pay less for higher rankings. This is great news for honest advertisers.

Google determines the Quality Score according to:

-Click through rate (CTR)
-Relevance of ad to keywords
-Landing page
-Campaign history
-various other factors

How to get better Quality Scores

There are a number of things you can do to try and improve the Quality Score:

1. Improve your CTR. The CTR is the number of clicks/number of impressions.

There are various ways to increase your CTR :

- Day-part – check when your conversion rate is the lowest and consider removing your ads during these hours

- Geo-target – maybe you are a local business and your ads are running in irrelevant countries, states etc Select only relevant business areas.

- Add negative words to your campaign – by doing this you avoid your ad being displayed for something irrelevant to your product/service. Once your campaign is running it is really easy to find these words by running ‘broad’ keywords and then checking the search query report or by going to the keywords tab and clicking the search term button.

- Add new good keywords found in the search queries as ‘phrase’ or ‘exact’ match – by doing this and by adding irrelevant words as negatives, your broad keyword type will be used only for query mining and you should see less and less search terms appearing here.

- Pause or delete poorly performing Adgroups or Campaigns – this will help raise your average CTR. Having low CTRs on some of your keywords will affect the whole of your campaign. Google has a long memory and remembers the history of your campaign.

- Good, eye-catching ads – these will help you stand out from the competition.

- Relevant ads – only display ads that are totally relevant to the search term.

- Separate Search and Content Network campaigns – this is essential as the content network CTR and conversion rates tend to be lower and bid rates should be different to those you are willing to pay for Search. The keywords purchased for the Content Network should be different to the Search keywords. This is due to the fact that you are not purchasing search terms but rather keywords used on the page where the ad is being displayed.

This means that if you are selling kids clothing you might add keywords such as ‘mums’ and ‘women’.

2. Build small Adgroups that target small numbers of highly related keywords. Make sure the ads for each Adgroup are highly relevant to the set of keywords.

3. Improve your landing page relevance by incorporating the search term within the text on the landing page and make sure that your landing page loads quickly.

Following the above guidelines and you should be able to raise your Quality Score and reduce your cost per click considerably.