Improving Paid Search Quality Scores

If you are managing any form of advertising, getting the biggest bang for your buck should be at the top of your mind. Spend less, make more.

When it comes to paid search advertising, there is any number of ways to get more for less. One of them is by paying attention to your quality scores. In short, a higher quality score can mean you actually pay less for the same — or even higher — placement.

In effect you could actually be paying less (i.e. cpc) than a competitor bidding on the same keyword(s) yet have a higher placement in the search results.

So what can you do to better you quality scores? Well the real key is keep things relevant. Keywords should be relevant to the ad and to the landing page the user ends up on. This can often be achieved by developing tightly focused groups of keywords (sometimes only 2 or 3 per group) based around a single ad group. Do not try to lump everything you are bidding on into one giant campaign / ad group — our ability to focus will be quickly lost, and that won’t only hurt your quality scores, it will hurt your sales conversion.

Yes, developing a large number of tightly focused groups can be time consuming (but there are some tools out there that can help make it easier). In the end, it is worth the effort. I have campaigns I manage consisting of over 17,000 keywords broken into several hundred ad groups containing several thousand ads. Then others I manage consist of just a handful of keywords. The process of developing a paid search campaign that delivers high ROI is the same in all instances — focus on relevancy and tight groups of highly targeted keywords.

You can read any number of article relating to paid search quality scores. Rather than write another that re-iterates what is already out there, I thought I would list links to several below that I found interesting.

• Ultimate Quality Score Guide. 15 Experts Comment on how to increase quality scores.
• 10 Ways to Increase Adwords Quality Score
• The Quality Score Handbook
• 5 Steps to Optimizing a PPC Account
  

Enjoy!