How to easily improve Google Ads – AdWords – Quality Scores?

Stuck with poor quality scores of your keywords in AdWords campaigns? Not sure where to get started to fix them? The following are some of the proven techniques to help you improve quality score. 

Improve Expected CTR to improve quality score: 

Improving Expected CTR of your AdWords keywords directly impacts the quality score positively. 

The higher your ad ranks, the better your expected CTR will be, right? No, it’s not. A higher ad position impacts your CTR, but not the Expected CTR. Practically, there’s a difference between the two. While the CTR metric is related to past performance, the Expected CTR is an auction time expectation.

So, how to improve your Expected CTR?

→ Write ad copies that speak to the users’ search queries and their intents. It does not mean using your keywords in the ad texts overwhelmingly. It means being relevant. Relevant to the intent of the search terms.  Let’s take an example:

Will you click on the above ad if it showed for a search query – iphone x cases? Most certainly, you won’t. Why? Because it lacks relevance both to the search query and the intent. Take a different ad now…

Isn’t the above ad more relevant?

Let’s not stop here. Take another example. A search for ‘GST Consultant in Delhi’ showed the following ad on Google:

Now the second ad…

Will you click the first ad in the example if you get to see the second ad as well below it for the same search query?

I am sure; you know the difference now. The game is about relevance and intent, not just about the keywords in the description texts or in the ad headlines.

Hence, you should keep following in mind where writing your ad copies:

  • Research PPC keywords like a pro, pick them by intent
  • Be relevant to search queries
  • Be relevant to the purpose that the search query has
  • Have the CTA prominent in your copy
  • Make ad speak values, the values matching the intent of the searcher

→ Additional tip: Convince users that it does not end with the ad, your landing page as well is relevant to their queries. The easiest hack to do that is to include main terms of your keywords in the Display URL.

Fix Poor Ad Relevance:

How to improve AdWords Ad Relevance? It’s not that difficult.

Ad Relevance is another important metric that you need to work on to improve quality score. The best place to start would be – Search Query Report. Spend some time analyzing your search query report to verify if your ads are appearing for the right search terms. Looking at this report will also give you a clue about whether you need to have additional ad-groups in your campaigns or not.

Let’s take a real example:

The key findings that we get looking at the above search query report are:

  • The keyword ‘skin care products’ is triggering ads for several search terms which have different context and intents. However, they are still relevant and include the keyword.
  • It would be difficult to establish a better ad relevance to the keyword ‘best face skin care products’ if the advertiser writes ads for ‘skin care products’. The same is the scenario for the keywords like – best baby skin care products brand,  summer skin care products, skin care products online, and best baby skin care products brand.
  • However, the advertiser is already getting above average CTR, it would help improve ad relevance if he/she creates separate ad groups for these keywords and writes dedicated ad copies for them. The ad relevance would improve if dedicated ad groups and ad copies are created for the keywords in question.

Improve Landing Page Experience:

How to improve landing page experience score for a keyword in AdWords? It’s tricky but easily doable.

Landing page optimization is one of the most crucial steps of any online advertising campaigns, and with AdWords, it’s the most occult yet imperative thing. Everything else is only half of the story, and the real action happens on the landing page. For this reason, you need to take landing page experience more seriously than everything else. Improving the landing page helps improve quality score.

If you want to improve your landing page experience, it’s important to note that it has not to do anything with Title, Meta, or HTML header tags, or even ALT texts. What’s crucial here is the fact that how well have you optimized it for your potential customers’ experience?

A good landing page experience comprises of several things, like – it’s navigation, loading speed, device-friendly layouts, security, contents,  contact details etc..  In addition to all these things, it’s the relevance that matters the most. Your landing page needs to be relevant to your ads, their intents, and to the primary call to actions. Your landing page needs to be an extension of the ad where your ads offer a brief synopsis, and the landing page talks about it in detail. If you can do that, your landing page experience score will always be higher.

Here are some of the quick tips to improve landing page experience:

  • Make your landing page’s most prominent or opening line match with ad headline if possible
  • Have the same or similar CTA on the landing page as in the ad if possible
  • The mobile version of your landing page should be talking to the point, no exaggeration. The visitors from mobile devices need quick answers. Think of a user browsing from the bus stop waiting for the bus?
  • Optimize your page speed to the best you can
  • Have https version of the URL
  • Have contact information accessible from every page
  • Have CTA buttons bigger and broader on mobile-specific pages. Give enough space around it so that it does not overlap with any other link. In short, make it easy to touch and take actions.

Things that don’t impact your AdWords quality score:

The one most significant adverse effect of the internet being more and more accessible and popular every day is that today we have a reasonably large number of self-proclaimed experts. Everyone says they are experts. If it’s right, it’s fantastic. If it isn’t, several myths are bound to surface. And in the context of AdWords, it’s innumerable. Here are a few facts in the context of quality score that will keep you safe and myths away:

  • Your average ad position does not impact your quality score at all.
  • The calculation of Expected CTR does not account for average ad positions at all.
  • Your account structure, the way you have named and structured your campaigns and ad-groups, does not impact your ad quality score.
  • Your performance of ads in Display Network does not impact your quality score on the search network.

 

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