27 Tips For Improving Your Google Adwords Quality Score

Tips For Improving Your Adwords Quality Score

To best organize this blog, I’ve broken down the tips into 3 sections:  Landing Pages, Click Thur Rates, and Keyword Relevance.

Quality Score Tips | Landing Pages

1.  To find out what Google has to say about understanding the Landing Page Experience, please visit https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2404197/?hl=en

2.  Make sure your landing page is relevant to the keyword. This means that you will have to create multiple destinations based on your keywords.  For example, we have a client that is a nursing college.  They used to send all traffic to a long, 1 page site that gave information on all 6 of their courses.  Naturally, the course at the top did the best because people saw what they were looking for right away.  However, the other 5 keywords performed poorly.  Once we created individual course pages and ran traffic to the according pages, the bounce rate greatly decreased (as did the cost per lead!)

3.  Make sure your landing page is easy to navigate.  A confused mind will click away.  The easier a page is to navigate, the longer a person will stay on the page.  Your ‘bounce’ rate is key to letting Google know that your landing page is relevant to the keyword searched for by your customer.

4.  Make sure the message on the ad is congruent with the message on the landing page – if your ad mentions a coupon for a particular item, for example, make sure both the item and the coupon are on that page.

5.  Make sure your Landing Page has content.  While your goal may be to get an opt in, you will not be able to do so without providing content first.  For example, if you’re offering an opportunity to shop for products and receive a coupon, yet your landing page only has the opportunity to opt in to receive a coupon, your site will be given a low quality score.

6.  Think ‘hyper-local’ on your landing pages.  Using a local phone number vs. an 800 number doubled the number of phone calls in this test.  Even if you are statewide, then use local phone numbers on different relevant area codes.

7.  Make sure your site is optimized for mobile.

8.  BONUS: Here are examples of 17 inspiring landing page: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/06/15/landing-page-inspiration

Quality Score Tips |Click Thru Rates

CTR is the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown expressed as a percentage (clicks ÷ impressions = CTR).  For example, if you had 5 clicks and 1000 impressions, then your CTR would be 0.5%. The CTR is relevant because a higher CTR is a good indication that users find your ads helpful & relevant.  Here are some tips on how to improve your CTR…

9.  Add ad extensions & sitelinks – these ad extensions will help you take up more space and show additional text & info for your ads.

10.  Extended headlines – by ending your description line 1 with a punctuation mark, the line is then added to the headline.  This allows the ad to stand out and get more clicks.

11.  Use trademarks – this can help build legitimacy and credibility.  Plus, these characters stand out, which makes people more likely to click on them!

12.  Remove pricing –  when you include pricing in the ad, you may force  decision without the person landing on your page.  If you have a price in your ad, try removing it and replacing with a discount instead.  Test, test, and test more!

13.  Test different ad copy – try these tips…

14.  Write eye catching headlines that pop

15.  Use strong action verbs

16.  Highly specific calls to actions

17.  Testimonial quotes

18.  Include bonuses

19.  Appeal to their lack of patience (Get answers now!)

10.  Ask a question

Quality Score Tips |Keyword Relevance

21.  Change your match types (exact match or phrase match) to target a more select group.

22.  Make sure the keyword is in the headline and the ad copy.  This sounds simple, but is typically one of the most common mistakes advertisers make.

23.  Highlight your unique value proposition – how do you differentiate, what makes you unique or better than everyone else?

24.  If using broad match, use ‘negative keywords’ to decrease traffic from related but irrelevant searches. A negative keyword excludes your ad from appearing on search pages making use of the term.

25.  Edit the display url to add a keyword.  The URL can have 35 characters and doesn’t have to be an actual URL.  As long as your root domain in the ad & site are the same, consider this space an opportunity for marketing.  You can add a product name, a feature or benefit, or an additional keyword to make the copy more attractive.  For example, www.boots.com/snowboots for your actual landing page could be www.snowboots.boots.com/snowboots.

26.  Use Dynamic Keyword Inserion (DKI) – an advanced Adwords feature that enables you to improve the relevancy of your ad copy by inserting the search query into a specified area of the ad.  Simply enter a snippet of code with in the ad and this will change the defined elements of your copy to exactly match the user’s query.

27.  Keep testing new keywords!

If you liked ’27 Tips On How To Improve Your Google Adwords Quality Score’, then you’ll love other pay per click marketing articles available at http://blog.socialmediaadgenius.com