Whether you’re creating a Google ad campaign from scratch or you’re looking to improve an existing one, your approach to campaign management should always be holistic. One of the key metrics to look at when evaluating the success of your Google PPC campaign is your Quality Scores. Not only do your Quality Scores serve as a barometer for the overall health of your PPC campaign, but they help to mitigate the risk associated with campaign management while maximizing your ROIs. Let’s review.
What Exactly are Google Quality Scores?
Your Google Quality Scores are indicators of the overall effectiveness of your paid search campaigns. The better your Quality Scores are, the better your ads will perform at a lower cost.
Google Quality Scores are determined by three factors:
1) Your expected click-through rate (CTR)
2) Ad relevance, and
3) The user’s landing page experience
Google bases these scores off of the historical performance data found in your account.
Now that we know what Google Quality Scores are, let’s review why we should care about them.
Why You Should Care About Quality Scores
Only Google knows how much each of these factors is weighed to determine your Quality Score. It is understood, however, that the most important measurement in calculating your score is your click-through rate. Google’s end game is to provide its users with a great experience. When Google sees that a user found and clicked on your ad, that’s a good indicator to them that your ad was a successful experience. The better the user experience, the better the reward that Google hands out in terms of higher ad rankings and lower costs.
Optimizing Your PPC Campaign for Better Quality Scores
Now that it’s known that better Quality Scores yield more bang for your Google PPC advertising buck, how do you best optimize for Quality Scores? Let’s review.
Keywords:
Since relevant keywords are an intricate part of your PPC campaign’s success, that’s a good place to start. Two important facets that you can work on are:
- Developing highly relevant keywords (long tail opportunities too!), and
- Segmenting your keywords to correlate with individual ad groups
- Additionally, if you are getting lots of clicks and impressions but have a low conversion rate, it may be a good time to trim out the bad traffic with negative keywords
Ads:
You will want to review your ads to ensure that your keywords are present and that your ads are simple with strong calls to action. Best practice dictates that you have at least three ad variations for every ad group you create, and that you segment your ads device-specific. If you haven’t started using extensions yet, you should. Not only do they make your ads bigger and allow you to highlight more features and benefits, but Google gives ads with extensions higher priority rankings as well.
Landing Pages:
Lastly, you’ll want to make sure your landing pages are following Google’s best practices. Ideally, you’re striving to make the user’s experience cohesive and relevant from keyword to conversion. Reviewing your landing pages’ metrics often will help you to make more informed decisions about what changes you need to make to produce more leads and conversions.
The Takeaway
Understanding the basis of your Quality Scores is one component in managing a successful PPC campaign. It’s important to note that your first and foremost objective should always be to improve your overall campaign’s health, not just to tweak for higher Quality Scores. Effective and efficient PPC campaigns will produce higher Quality Scores, which, in-turn, helps you get the most mileage out of your PPC campaign budget.
For help getting started on a successful PPC advertising campaign or help on tweaking an existing one, contact our team of professionals at McAllister Marketing today for a no-obligation assessment and to learn how we tailor our services to your exact needs and business objectives.