Quality Score

From spend monitoring to ad ranking, keeping tabs on your campaign performance across your different marketing channels can be a lot of work. And because optimization is the key to a successful campaign, it’s good to stay in the know. However, most of us are not on our computers all the time, so we need an easy and efficient way to stay on top of it all, and be notified of any major changes immediately.

With Marin’s Automated Alerts, you can stay in the know with automatic monitoring and notifications for all your marketing campaigns. These alerts bring changes directly to your inbox, so that you can be notified as soon as they happen. This means timelier analysis and action, so that your campaigns can continue running smoothly even while you're away.

Check out these 5 alerts that you can set up in Marin to stay productive, optimize strategy, and make the most out of each advertising dollar.

1. Monitor CPA

This may feel pretty standard. But as a reminder, the cost of an acquisition or conversion is important to ensure not only that our ads are converting, but that they are doing so at a profitable rate. It is important to modify an alert like this one with an impressions count to be sure that an ad or campaign has reached enough users to properly determine an ideal CPA.

Example: Alert me if impressions are greater than 1000 and CPA is greater than X.

2. Getting Close to Spend Cap

This can help you monitor your budget pacing, and view the rate at which your campaigns spend. Take action before your cap is hit so that you make adjustments to achieve your performance goals.

Example: Alert me if total spend > $950 (where spend cap = $1000).

3. Impression Share is Dropping

If your strategy includes top or absolute top impression share, this alert is for you. By receiving a notification when an ad’s impression share drops below your target, you can take the appropriate action (improve ad ranking, evaluate keywords, expand budget) before falling too far behind.

Example: Alert me if the impression share drops by more than 10%

4. Check Keywords

If you’re testing out some new keywords for your campaigns, use this alert to monitor their performance and iterate when necessary. This alert is great for keyword strategy

Example: Alert me if CTR is less than 3% for selected keywords.

5. Ads Not Converting

Your ads may not be converting because of audience targeting, ad copy, or user-experience on your landing page, you want to be notified about ads that don’t lead consumers to the end goal of a purchase or sign-up. This helps you save money and optimize your campaign for success.

Example: Alert me if I’ve spent more than $1000 and conversion rate is less than 10%.

Once you’ve created these alerts, you can breathe a bit easier knowing that if something dramatically shifts in a campaign, you’ll be notified and can take action immediately. Automated alerts in Marin are customizable and can be set up in just a few minutes. Schedule time with an account representative today to learn more!

This is a guest post from Ashley Aptt, Account Lead at 3Q Digital.

Many advertisers underestimate the impact that ad copy can have on paid search performance. But ad copy is an essential element in generating traffic to your site, learning about your target audience, and improving efficiency to save money and drive stronger results.

With Google making the shift from Standard Text Ads to Expanded Text Ads, now is the perfect time to re-evaluate your ad copy, take advantage of the new ad features, and improve ad performance.

Here are three reasons marketers should focus on better ads.

1. It’s The First Thing Users See

Within a matter of seconds, users perform an online search, skim their options on the search engine results page, and determine which ad to click. Ad copy is one of the primary elements a user evaluates when deciding which site to visit.

• Which company has the best offer?
• Which brand seems most reputable and trustworthy?
• Which ad seems most relevant to my needs?

These are all things a potential customer could be thinking when deciding which site to visit.

Ad copy gives advertisers the platform to communicate their message and showcase their value propositions. Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) offer more character space to help get your message across to potential customers. Use this space wisely, as it could be the only chance to win the sale from a competitor.

2. Learn about Your Customers

An important part of making sure you’re using strong ad copy is to incorporate a solid ad copy testing strategy. You’ll never know what messaging, call to action, or value proposition resonates best with your target audience until you start testing different ad elements and measuring results.

When kicking off an ad copy test, be sure to focus on one element at a time. There’s a lot of opportunity for testing within ETAs. For example, you can test two headline messages against each other while leaving everything else the same. Or, test alternative calls to action in the description line while keeping the rest of the ad copy consistent between both ad variations.

Testing one element a time ensures you’re able to accurately determine which message delivers the best results. Once you determine a winning ad variation, don’t stop there—keep testing different elements against the winning variation.

Ad copy testing doesn’t just help you refine your ad copy—it also allows you to learn more about your customers. For instance, in an A/B value proposition test, you could learn whether your customers find “Free Shipping” or “0% Financing” more appealing. Aside from updating your ad copy appropriately, use the test result learnings across various marketing channels and improve your performance for social, email, and display campaigns, too.

3. Improve Efficiency and Save Money

ETAs give advertisers the perfect opportunity to rethink their ad copy messaging. Rather than just inserting a second headline, think about the entire message you’d like to deliver, and make sure the message in your ad is relevant to the search query.

The additional character space you gain with ETAs also provides the ability to further explain your business offerings and can help pre-qualify users before they click your ad. This can help you home in on your target audience and weed out users who may be looking for something different.

All in all, utilizing ad copy that’s relevant to what the user’s searching can help improve your click-through rate and Quality Score, which ultimately reduces your cost per click. It can also pre-qualify your visitors and help reduce bad clicks. Overall, strong ad copy can end up saving you money and improving your ROAS.

Conclusion

Don’t underestimate the power of strong ad copy. Use the additional character limits with ETAs as an opportunity to connect with your users, stand out from the competition, and drive qualified traffic to your site. Apply learnings from ad copy testing to improve your paid search performance and expand the lessons to other marketing channels as well.

Google has made a historic change to its creative format with the introduction of a mobile optimized format called “Expanded Text Ads” (ETA). In this post, we provide information to help you understand what’s changing, why it’s a positive thing, and how to automatically make your existing ads ETA-compatible. (Pro tip: Skip to the end of this article if that last point is what you’re after.)

What Are Expanded Text Ads?

Expanded Text Ads are a mobile-optimized ad-format designed to maximize an advertiser's performance in mobile search results. This is accomplished by providing the advertiser significantly more ad copy to highlight their product or service. Expanded Text Ads also apply to desktop search results.

This change is a big deal because it’s a fundamental shift away from the legacy AdWords text ad format that’s existed for well over a decade. As such, this change will require every AdWords advertiser to rewrite their ads to be ETA-compatible. To learn how to automatically do this, skip ahead to the end of this post.

What’s Changing, Exactly?

Advertisers now have two headlines instead of one, and these headlines are joined with a hyphen. The good news – this copy expansion allows ads to occupy 50% more space on the search results page. Early results indicate that this increased presence improves CTR, which makes sense when you compare the old format (left) to the new format (right):

Here are the nitty-gritty details:

• Headline 1 and headline 2 are 30 characters each. This is a 240% increase over legacy text ads, which historically had just one headline and a 25-character maximum.
• For the description line, the character count is also increasing. Instead of two 35-character description lines, there’s just one that’s 80 characters.
• The display URL will now be automatically extracted from your destination URL. You can set up to two path fields like “golf” and “shoes”.

As marketers, we’re excited by all of these updates, and think that the addition of a new headline is only going to help performance, especially in a mobile world.

A Positive Change, for Multiple Reasons

Why is this change a net-positive for advertisers?

• You gain a new, second headline.
• More characters for longer messaging increase the odds of connecting with your target audience.
• We’re seeing better overall performance in our early results.

Why is Google Making This Change?

A couple of obvious questions are: Why is Google making this change? And why now?

The short answer: Consumers have shifted to mobile as their primary method of accessing the Internet. And, advertising dollars are following in rapid succession. eMarketer estimates that in 2016, over 60% of all digital advertising spend will go to mobile. It’s also expected that mobile will continue to gobble up market share through 2020.

Google is staying ahead of this trend by shifting to mobile-optimized ads, which is consistent with the elimination of right-hand ads back in February. In the next 12-24 months, we should see more mobile-centric changes from all major publishers, as they train their attention on perfecting mobile monetization.

How Can I Automatically Make My Ads ETA-Compatible?

Stay tuned for more details, insights, and data as we continue to report on Expanded Text Ads.

This is a contributed post from Todd Mintz, SEM expert at 3Q Digital.

I love Marin's bidding algorithm, and given the opportunity, I can write geeky, complex blog posts on its power that would confuse most of the folks on the bidding team. Since I do wish to contribute to this blog again in the future, I will refrain from doing so and focus my initial post on something super-basic that even Marin neophytes can implement and benefit from.

When onboarding a new account to the Marin platform, the project manager assigned to the account will stress to you that the system needs 30 days of data before Marin bidding can be safely launched. Since you’re likely a few weeks into the onboarding of the account, it’s tough to stay patient while continuing to rely upon lesser methods for bidding your accounts. Luckily for you, I’ve figured out a bidding technique that can be implemented immediately and doesn’t require 30 days of data.

For a while now, Marin’s system has been capturing Google Quality Score (and has recently begun to capture Bing’s). Smart marketers like Larry Kim have correlated high quality score to low CPAs. So, at a very basic level, we can use Marin to severely bid down low-QS terms while bidding up high-QS terms.

I divided my Google keywords into two folders: The Main Campaign and the Low-QS Campaign. All keywords with QS < 4 were placed into the Low-QS Campaign, and the remainder were placed in the Main Campaign. The Boost percentages here are good starting points but are somewhat arbitrary…different situations might require different percentages, and these numbers should be tweaked through the month based upon account performance

In 100% of the accounts I’ve worked with, this technique has boosted performance for the first 30 days of an account on the Marin platform. You can implement this hack while continuing to do all your other pre-Marin, non-automated bidding tactics. Once the 30-day mark passes, you can then do your full Marin bidding segmentation – though in all my accounts, I’ve kept the low-QS bucket. What’s really cool is that with Marin’s assistance, I’ve turned low-QS keywords into a profit center, which you’re not supposed to be able to do. :-)

Please also note that Quality Score is a dynamic metric; certain keywords will rise out of the Low-QS Folder and others will fall into it. One needs to periodically update the distribution of the keywords in the folders in order to insure optimum bidding performance. Also, I have seen a correlation between this bidding technique for low-QS terms and an increase in Quality Score for many of said terms, though I’m not able to prove causation.

Good luck and feel free to add any questions or comments below!

About the Author

Todd Mintz, who has been with 3Q Digital since March 2011, has worked in search engine marketing since 2000 and has used Google AdWords since it began. He also is very visible in the SEM social media space and is a curator/contributor at MarketingLand. He was one of the founding members of SEMpdx (Portland’s Search Engine Marketing Group), is a current board member, and writes regularly on their blog.

For many search marketers, identifying opportunities for optimization within paid search campaigns is challenging. Monitoring and maintaining top performing ad groups, keywords, and ads is a standard best practice; but as campaigns grow, keyword lists expand, and creative tests multiply, this approach fails to scale and provide incremental improvements in paid search performance. With so many optimization opportunities hidden in an ocean of data, how can search marketers give the required attention each campaign deserves? Where do you even start?

To help search marketers answer these questions, Marin Software is thrilled to announce our partnership with BoostCTR to offer a free paid search diagnostics tool that not only provides insight into account performance, but also opportunities for optimization. The Account Performance Grader is designed to analyze historical performance across keywords, ads, quality scores, and ad groups for AdWords and Bing Ads campaigns. Simply sign up and enter the required information to receive your customized report.

Among other best practice recommendations, this report will provide actionable insights for pausing poor performing keywords and ads, as well as reveal quality score trends that identify areas where keyword relevance can be improved. With the Account Performance Grader, search marketers can remove the guesswork out of campaign optimization and focus their time on more strategic, high impact tasks.

Sign up here and start optimizing your campaigns today!

Of all the search publisher metrics available, Quality Score seems to always receive the most attention; yet search marketers have the least amount of visibility into how to effectively improve it and its impact on performance. What we do know is that every time a user conducts a search that triggers ads, a Quality Score is calculated based on a number of factors, including:

• The keyword's past click-through rate (CTR)
• The display URL's past CTR
• The account history
• The quality of the landing page
• The keyword/ad relevance
• The keyword/search relevance

Notice that the first three factors on Google’s list reference performance history, even though the history of a keyword’s Quality Score is unavailable within the AdWords interface. Instead, rather than showing different Quality Scores across time, Google displays a single Quality Score that provides an estimate of that keyword’s overall quality.

For the most part this is adequate—search marketers analyze Quality Score at individual moments in time to understand keyword relevance and performance issues. However, this one-off-style approach to analyzing Quality Score fails to provide insight into how search marketers’ continuous efforts to optimize campaigns impact Quality Score, either positively or negatively.

Whether it’s testing brand new creative or introducing additional negative keywords, improving a keyword’s Quality Score can lead to a lower cost-per-click (CPC) and a higher ad position. Changes in these two metrics can subsequently impact, among other things: CTR, costs, and return on investment (ROI). Unfortunately, the influence each of those best practices has on keyword Quality Score is frequently lost with time, especially within larger accounts. Imagine having to record the daily Quality Score for two million keywords affected by new creative messaging.

To understand the impact of optimization efforts on Quality Score, search marketers need the ability to trend historical Quality Score, against other performance metrics, over time.

For example, by trending Quality Score and average CPC over a 3 month period, search marketers can understand the exact impact on cost that comes from an increase in Quality Score from 6 to 8. Trends that include other metrics like ROI and conversion rate highlight the indirect impact that Quality Score has on conversion and revenue goals. Though the concept of trending Quality Score over time appears basic, many search marketers are unable to do so.

To see a demo of historical Quality Score and other advance metrics in action, please contact Marin.

If you’ve ever browsed through your AdWords account, you’ve most likely encountered Google’s pesky keyword status, “Below first page bid”. This estimate is based on your keyword’s Quality Score and competition, and is the bid you’ll likely need to set in order for your creative to show on the first page of search results. Though these keywords are active, they’re most likely missing out on a large chunk of impressions, and potential clicks and conversions. Since this first page bid is directly linked to Quality Score, marketers that regularly experience high first page bid estimates will likely benefit from improvements to their keyword’s Quality Score. Today we’ll review two strategies for decreasing your first page minimum bid.

AdWords

Marin Enterprise



When adding a new keyword, you’ll notice that Google automatically assigns an initial Quality Score. Whether that score is high or low, it’s determined by the keyword’s historical performance for other advertisers who have targeted that same keyword. As a result of this assigned Quality Score, your initial keyword bid might be below the first page bid estimate. As a best practice, be sure to check the status of all your newly added keywords and ensure that you’ve set appropriate bids that are above the first page minimum. It’s critical that marketers do this, since a keyword’s initial performance will dictate whether or not its Quality Scores move above or below the assigned score. Give your keyword bids an initial boost to help facilitate a higher ad position. A higher ad position promotes a higher click-through-rate (CTR), which remains one of the most significant factors in improving Quality Score. Once your keywords have established their own Quality Score, hopefully better than what was inherited, reassess your bids. With higher Quality Scores, your first page bid estimates will have dropped, allowing you to bid less for the same ad position.

For keywords that have an established Quality Score, decreasing the first page minimum bid can be a long and difficult task. In addition to setting an appropriate bid above the first page minimum, marketers must take the necessary steps to increase keyword relevance to promote higher CTRs. Create an organized campaign structure that promotes granular groups containing a highly focused set of keywords. In addition, generate relevant and engaging creative to support your keyword set. Finally, assign appropriate landing pages that focus on providing the best customer experience. These tried and true best practices not only ensure that relevancy is maintained from impression to conversion, but will result in Quality Score improvements and decreases to first page minimum bids.

For additional best practices on improving Quality Score, click here.

Whether you’re just starting out in paid search or have fully built out search campaigns, in order to be successful, you’ll want to know how to implement negative-keywords within your campaigns. Why? Actively managing negatives is possibly the single most impactful tool marketers have to increase revenues and lower costs. The virtuous circle of lowering costs while simultaneously increasing quality and position results in a win-win for the advertiser: increased revenue and ROI. Given the benefits, negative keywords should always be a top consideration for advertisers looking to optimize paid search.

In a recent white paper, Marin Software reviews the benefits of successful negatives strategies and presents a variety of best practices for deploying and managing negatives. Some of these best practices include:

• 
  
• Strategies for Identifying Negatives: Where does one start when identifying negative keywords? Learn 5 tactics for sourcing negatives, as well as tips and tricks for implementing these methods efficiently.
• Using Negatives to Shape Traffic: One of the most common methods for shaping traffic with negatives is by creating match-type silos. Discover how match-type silos force search engines to trigger the correct keyword-match-type combination for each query and how to implement them in your campaigns.
• Negative-Keyword Strategies for Yahoo! & Bing: Marketers should not assume that negatives in adCenter act the same way as negatives in AdWords. Find out the important differences in the treatment of negatives between the two search engines.
• 
  

Gain a complete understanding of how to leverage negatives to maximize revenue and performance for online advertising programs. More importantly, become equipped with the techniques necessary to make a strategic implementation of negatives a reality.

Download the free white paper here.

About a month ago, Google announced the global roll-out of an update to the AdWords algorithm that increases the value of landing page relevancy and quality when determining Quality Score. Google predicted with these changes, some campaigns would see variations in keyword Quality Scores and ad positions, but most would not see a significant change in overall performance. At Marin, we decided to investigate.

We sampled a population of 240 accounts across our Marin Enterprise client base that had limited average bid movements, consistent keyword counts, and consistently received greater than 1,000 impressions per day. For these 240 accounts, we examined the daily impression-weighted Quality Score at the publisher account level.

From the sample accounts, we observed 12 accounts with an increase in Quality Score greater than 0.25.

When taking a closer look at two of these accounts, we see the spike in Quality Score occurred on 10/2/2011 – 10/4/2011. Furthermore, there was little change to Click-Through Rates during this time, which suggests that the increase in Quality Score was related to the quality of their landing page.

We also identified 15 accounts that had a week-over-week drop in Quality Score of 0.25 or more.

After further investigation into four of these accounts, we see the drop in Quality Score took place between 10/2/2011 – 10/4/2011, with minimal change in Click-Through Rates, indicating these accounts had landing pages that Google deemed to be less relevant, adversely impacting quality.

What our investigation and findings suggest:

• The updated AdWords algorithm has had limited impact on Quality Scores.
• Only about 11.25% of Google Accounts saw their Quality Score change by more than 0.25 as a result of the algorithm change.
• If you did see a decrease in Quality Score during the 10/2/2011 – 10/4/2011 timeframe, with little or no change to Click-Through Rates, consider improving your landing pages to account for this change in Google’s algorithm.

Just last week, Google released their third quarter earnings. With almost $10 Billion in revenue for the quarter, the search giant continues to show strong and consistent top line growth. In their earnings report, Google noted a 5% increase in the average cost per click (CPC) on a year over year (YOY) basis.

In contrast, the typical Marin user running a Google paid search campaign during this time saw an 18% decline in CPC, coupled with higher click through rates (CTR). This combination of decreasing CPCs and increasing CTR resulted in a higher return on ad spend (ROAS) for Marin users. Assuming no changes in other factors, the following chart shows how reducing the CPC leads to a direct increase in the ROAS.

As ROAS is also affected by ad position and Quality Score, we normalized for the influence of these two factors by looking at CTR trends. The chart below shows how CTR actually increased across our user base during this time, implying that Quality Score and ad position did not have an adverse impact on ROAS.

While this trend doesn’t apply to every client, our data suggests that the average Marin user may have outperformed the average AdWords user. So, how did this happen?

We think that these performance gains can be attributed to the following three factors:

1) Improved Keyword Matching – Marin users leveraged match types more effectively. More clicks were observed coming from exact and phrase match terms, which led to higher CTRs and lower average CPCs.

2) Bidding Efficiencies – Marin’s bidding algorithm automates keyword bids based on user defined business goals (such as ROAS), leading to more efficient capital allocation across the keyword portfolio.

3) Cross-Channel Visibility – Many conversions happen offline or in a call center. Because Marin incorporates conversion data from online and offline channels, users have complete visibility into their paid search performance and can make smarter, informed decisions about where and how they spend precious ad dollars.

Download the complete quarterly report behind this blog post and learn about the latest trends across verticals, devices and search engines.

(Note: You will be asked to fill out a short registration form to gain access to the full report)

Do we need to choose a target position for our Google keyword set? Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google doesn't think so.

Recently Google decided to retire the Position Preference in Adwords. The reasons cited were:

1. Low adoption
2. Existing alternatives for this feature

Low adoption? Really? Well, only Google would know and can decide that. There were a lot of advertisers who liked it and were using it. However, as Mr. Varian mentions, there are alternatives.

• Google’s “automated rules” can be used to maintain preferred positions. Details at the bottom of the article*
• Some 3rd party search management platforms offer a “bid to position” option.

The key question is: How important is an ad's position?



At the beginning of my search-marketing career, I was led to believe that it's all about the position. When I first started working Search Marketing, the top spot was considered to be the sweetest position. Heat-map studies confirmed this theory, which is consistent with eye-tracking, people start at top left and work down.

Also, research suggests that advertisers appearing at higher positions are viewed more favourably by consumers, as a certain repute and legitimacy is associated with premium advertising spots.

As the market matured and the competition increased, chasing that ever elusive top spot was no longer commercially viable. Advertisers started to test their ads in other positions. Devising position strategies became the holy grail of the new age SEM. Whilst only the top position would do for Brand terms, finding a new sweet spot for the core generic terms became essential.

Now, the latest blog post from Hal Varian suggests that we’ve been wasting our time. According to Hal, position targeting is overrated. Average position is not a true representation of the actual position your ads appeared on. This is particularly true for extended match types, wherein a variation of the search term could appear on position 12 whilst the other could be served at position 2; giving us an average position of 7, which is highly inaccurate. Even on exact match, due to the dynamic nature of the auction, the same ad, with the same bid, could appear on various positions throughout the day. Again, the average position fails to give us the true picture. Furthermore, a higher average position doesn’t necessarily translate into more clicks and conversions. A high traffic, highly competitive term, on a lower position would generate more qualified traffic than the less popular, longer tail term at position 1.

Back to square one: Does position matter?

I think it depends on the keyword type and purpose/objective of that keyword:

• Brand Terms: All advertisers would/should occupy the top spot for their core Brand and Brand Generic terms.
• Key (strategic) Generic terms: If you business is targeting a particular niche demographic/market, certain generic terms would deserve a “brand term” like treatment. For example, if your business specializes in offering car insurance to over 50’s, then “Over 50s car insurance” is that strategic generic term for you.
• Core Generic and Long tail terms: Ideally, to be treated on their merit (performance) and not position

The above, combined with the overall campaign objective, would define the position strategy. So if the overall objective is “Brand Awareness” then higher positions could be crucial. On the other hand if the campaign needs to be more CPA focused, then each keyword should be treated purely on its merit. Merit being clicks and conversions and not necessarily average position.

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, Google’s “automated rules” can be used to maintain a desirable position:

1. Go to the Keyword tab of the campaign.
2. From the Automate drop-down menu, choose Change max CPC bids when...
3. In the Automatic action section, select Raise bid and enter “x%” (e.g. 10%).You can also enter a maximum bid if you want (your bid won’t exceed the maximum).
4. Add a requirement that the average position must be worse than “y” (e.g. 4).
5. Then, specify that the rule should be performed every day at 12pm using data from the previous day.
6. Enter a name for your rule.
7. Choose whether you’d like to keep track of changes by receiving an email each time the rule runs.
8. Click Preview for keywords below to preview your rule and then click Save.

Maintaining a high Quality Score is important if you want to increase quality traffic and reduce costs. Publishers do not give detailed insights on how Quality Score is calculated. However, the publishers do provide some insight on how an online marketer can achieve and maintain Quality Score in their search campaign. There are four simple steps you need to take to bring your search campaign into “Quality Score Success”:

1. Campaign Structure
2. Keywords and History
3. Relevant Ad Copy
4. Landing Page

Campaign Structure

As a search marketer, it is important to start the process by truly knowing the brand you wish to advertise. This is because having knowledge of the brand will give you clear insight on how to create the campaign structure. Therefore, visit the brand site and learn the business as thoroughly as possible. Once you have clear knowledge of the brand, you will be able to easily categorize your business into separate components. You can categorize in any which way you choose, as long as it makes sense to the business. Once you have determined and broken down the different categories, you can easily create these into campaigns and adgroups within your search account.

Keywords and History

Once you have a well organized campaign structure, it is time to start looking for keywords.

Many advertisers select keywords after observing the campaign structure and making a “best guess” on what keyword will bring in good traffic. Although this method is a good way to start, just doing this will not be an effective way to bring up overall Quality Score for your account. This is because you have no insight on how these “best guess” keywords have historically performed or will perform in the near future. The engines reward accounts with rich historical data by raising overall Quality Score, and it turn, cheaper cost per click and stronger volume. Therefore, it is important that you generate a keyword list with historically high volume keywords. Keyword research is relatively simply due to the many sources available through the search engines. You can easily generate thousands of keywords by simply typing in a “best guess” keyword or the brand website. You can also check to see if any of your keyword considerations have enough historical volume to be qualified for your search account.

Also, it is important that the keywords you select are consistent and relevant to your adgroup. Many advertisers mix a list of unrelated, but high volume terms into an adgroup, hoping that it will improve performance. However, this is detrimental to Quality Score. Make sure that your keywords within an adgroup are related and relevant to the actual adgroup they reside. The key is that the keywords are relevant to the structure and to each other.

Relevant Ad Copy

Having relevant ad copy is just as important as having relevant keywords. This is because users respond more positively to ad copy that is relevant to their searched keyword. Therefore, if you have an account with relevant ad copy, you will see higher overall CTR% for your account. The This is due to the fact that relevant keyword/creative combos is what brings in a high CTR. Engines take high CTR% and relevancy, and use it as an important factor for determining Quality Score.

Creating relevant ad copy is a much more simple process once the campaign structure and keyword lists have been built. You can use these factors as a guide to keep all messaging relevant to your adgroup. Simply view the keyword list for any given adgroup, and use the keyword list to determine the best theme for the ad copy. The key is to create ad copy as relevant as possible to your original keyword set.

Landing Page

Once you have completed building your entire search account, it is time to find the appropriate landing pages.

This is where your knowledge of the brand will come to great use. As you have already visited and learned the website for your brand, you will be able to easily navigate and find relevant micro-pages to use as landing pages. Instead of having every ad default to a generic landing page, it is important to find micro-pages that are closely related to the ad copy and keyword list within an adgroup. The engines want to ensure that advertisers are providing the best user experience, thus making sure landing pages are closely relevant to the ad copy. Therefore, for any given adgroup, use the keyword and ad copy set to determine the most relevant and closely related landing page. This will guarantee a high Quality Score.