3 Simple Steps To Ensure Higher Quality Scores

Quality Score seems to be at the front of everyone’s minds these days and it has certainly been a talking point with all of my clients lately. In the days since this WordStream article was published, outlining how Google treats Quality Scores in 2013, there has been an ever-growing push to raise quality scores. Today I’m going to show you 3 easy steps to take when creating your AdWords campaigns that will make sure that your Quality Scores are as high as possible.

It’s About the Journey, Not the Destination (URL)

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One of the most commonly known facts about Quality Scores is that the more relevant your landing page/destination URL is to your target keywords, the higher the score, but achieving the highest possible quality scores before launching your campaign takes a lot more than inserting your keywords into your landing page and keyword scoring begins long before Google crawls your landing page.

Google works hard to provide a highly-effective, highly-focused advertising platform to attract & keep Adwords customers and the best way to succeed in the Adwords platform is to do exactly what Google wants (no surprise there, huh?). The best practice to follow when creating search campaigns in Adwords can be summed up into 3 simple steps:

1. Identify Your Product.
2. Describe Your Product.
3. Deliver Your Product.

If you adhere to these 3 simples steps when creating search network campaigns, you will ensure high quality scores (and lower CPC’s).

Step 1: Identify Your Product

Too many people make the mistake of targeting too many keywords when crafting their Adwords campaigns, in attempt to show ads for as many related terms as possible. This is not effective direct-resposnse advertising, rather a branding exercise (and there are better ways to accomplish this too). Don’t fall into the trap of jamming your campaign full of keywords. Instead, take time to make sure that your keywords describe your product accurately.

As an example, a business that cleans hardwood floors is explicitly different from a business that sells them. Neither of these businesses should be targeting a broad term like, hardwood floors, because it is too ambiguous to yield a focused result. The user searching for the cleaning company could trigger the ad by searching hardwood floor cleaners and the person looking to buy a new floor could trigger it with buy hardwood floors.

Once you have nailed down your keywords, it is time to organize them. This is a very important step in getting the highest possible quality score for those keywords.

The best practice here is to separate your keywords into ad groups that are defined by one operative term. As an example, here are examples of how you should organize keywords into ad groups:

• Campaign: Hardwood Flooring

  • Ad group: Oak Flooring

    • buy oak wood flooring

    • oak wood floors

    • oak hardwood floors

  • Ad group: Maple Flooring

    • buy maple wood flooring

    • maple wood floors

    • maple hardwood floors

  • Adgroup: Engineered Flooring

    • buy engineered wood flooring

    • engineered wood floors

    • engineered hardwood floors

The above example might not be the best and those individual keywords may need modifying to disambiguate, but this is an example of how you should be arranging ad groups for quality score maximization.

Now that we have organized our ad groups, it is time to make ads that match.

Step 2: Describe Your Product

When writing ads for your campaign, make different ads for each ad group that include your keywords. Using the hardwood example above, I might write 3 different ads, each of which speak to the ad group and contain the operative word from each group at least once:

Ad Group: Oak Flooring

Fred’s Oak Wood Flooring

We Sell High Quality Oak Flooring.

Free Delivery. Call Today!

www.websiteurl.com/oak

Ad Group: Maple Flooring

Fred’s Maple Wood Flooring

We Sell High Quality Maple Flooring.

Free Delivery. Call Today!

www.websiteurl.com/maple

Ad Group: Engineered Flooring

Fred’s Engineered Flooring

We Sell Quality Engineered Flooring.

Free Delivery. Call Today!

www.websiteurl.com/engineered

Now, I have focused ad groups, containing focused keywords, and topped off with focused ads. The last step in achieving those high quality scores is to deliver on what I am offering.

Step 3: Deliver Your Product

Now that the user has searched and found my ad, when they click on it, I want to make sure that what they see is exactly what they searched for in the first place. This will maximize my chances of conversion. Make sure that your landing page is relevant to the keywords that drive traffic there.

Going back to the hardwood example, my oak hardwood flooring ad should drive traffic to a page that contains information about the oak hardwood that I sell. The more specific and targeted I am here, the better my quality scores will be.

You can decide to use separate landing pages for each of your ad groups, or if you are budget/time constrained, you may elect to list all of your hardwood types on the same landing page. The most important part of this is for your landing page to contain the same keywords that you targeted in the first place.

If you are running multiple campaigns differentiated by city/geo location, then I strongly advise taking the time to make city-specific landing pages that include your keywords as often as possible.

That’s It!

Google wants users to use the Adwords platform responsibly and always keeping in mind the principles of keyword insertion and keyword granulation will help you to play by their rules.

Now it’s time for you to try this yourself. If you follow these 3 simple steps the next time you create an Adwords campaign, then you can expect higher than average Quality Scores, with lower CPC’s!

Thanks for reading.