Quality Score: 5 Steps to Optimizing a PPC Account
by Amber Speer, Hannapin Marketing
The most common
mistake when companies
try to manage their own
pay-per-click (PPC)
account is a lack of
organization around, and
understanding of the
Google Quality Score and
Yahoo! Quality Index.
Google Quality
Score is an
assigned number
from 1 – 10, based
on how well your
keywords relate to
your ad text and
landing pages.
The higher your Quality Score,
the higher your ads can be
ranked in position for less cost.
Generally speaking, in Google,
any keyword with a Quality
Score of 6 or below is considered
low.
The goal for most PPC advertisers is to achieve a higher
Quality Score; which sometimes means making large
changes within the account in a short amount of time. However,
this tactic can be detrimental to your overall account
health. Re-structuring and re-organizing your accounts for
a higher Quality Score can actually decrease your scores initially,
if not done correctly. A decrease in Quality Score will
essentially bring in less traffic and less conversions or leads,
at a higher spend. The goal then becomes to optimize your
account without initially killing existing high Quality Scores.
Low Quality Scores will eventually pick up in a few months
— but who wants to have a broken PPC account for any
length of time when the goal was to make it better?
Though trial and error, research, and speaking with my
Google and Yahoo! reps, I have found the best way to restructure
and optimize existing PPC accounts without
killing existing high Quality Scores.
1. Don’t be in a hurry. Whether restructuring your account
entirely, or just moving a few keywords around and
writing new ads, take it slow. Especially in Google, when
you make large changes in an account, it can throw the system
into “shock,” as we call it. Google assumes your Ad-
Words account was set up correctly in the first place. So,
when you begin to make large changes, Google thinks that
you must be doing something wrong, or made a mistake
the first time around. Therefore, after large changes to an account
your Quality Scores can tank. After a while (maybe
a few months) Google can see that you have actually improved
your organization, and your Quality Scores will
begin to recover. But a couple of months with bad Quality
Scores can result in lower traffic numbers, lower conversions,
fewer leads, and lower ROI. Therefore, make a plan
of optimizing your account week by week. Do one campaign
or ad group restructure per week, including writing
new ads, adjusting keyword bids, and settings.
2. Adjust campaign settings first. One thing you can
do quickly and should be done immediately is to make sure
your settings are correct for each campaign. The first setting
I make sure to change can be found under rotate ads > set
ads to rotate evenly. Do not set them to “optimize.” Setting
your ads to optimize means that Google will only show the
ad with the highest click-through rate. This also means that
if you’re writing new ads for testing purposes, you can not
split test (A/B) the new ad versus the old ad. The second
setting I change can be found under bidding and budget > delivery method. This should be set to “accelerate.” This
means that your ads will show as soon as someone types in
your keyword. Google has an option to show your ads
evenly throughout the day in order to make your daily
budget last longer. The problem with this is that you could
be missing out on potential qualified traffic by not having
your ads show at all times for any search query.
3. Don’t overwrite old ad text. If you’re testing ad text —
and you should be — do not write over the old ads, even if
they have lower click-through rates. If there are any ads you
wish to discontinue, simply pause the ad, and write an entirely
new one. Anytime you edit existing ad text you’re writing
over that ad’s click-through rate. Quality Score is based
on having a high click-through rate. If you remove or edit
ads with high or medium click-through rates and accidently
replace them with ads that have low click-through rates you
are hurting your Quality Scores.
4. Re-structure for optimal targeting. If your PPC account
has more than 20 keywords per ad group, or only has
one campaign in the entire account, it’s time to re-structure.
Remember, Quality Scores are based on how well your keyword
relates to your ad text. Therefore, if you have more
than 20 keywords in each ad group, you can probably break
those down into smaller, more targeted ad groups and write
better targeted ad text. Doing so will increase click-through
rates — a main driver of achieving higher Quality Scores. As
mentioned previously, when restructuring, take it slow. Execute
one campaign re-structure per day. In that campaign,
you will be examining all of the keywords in your ad groups
to find groups of keywords that can be broken out into their
own, new ad groups.
5. Adjust bids accordingly. Again, when it comes to
adjusting keyword bids, or pausing or deleting keywords,
take it slow. According to my Google reps, taking a keyword
bid from $10 down to $1 (or vice-versa) does not
register well with AdWords. If you find keywords that could
use major bid adjustments, pause them now then activate
them later when you have the time and budget to work
with those keywords.
Although it might be frustrating to make large changes
slowly, it will be worth it in the end. Achieving a high
Quality Score in Google or Yahoo! will take time — it’s
not an overnight fix but, eventually, you will see traffic, and
conversions and leads go up, while spend goes down.
About the Author: Amber Speer is a Senior Search Marketing Consultant at
Hanapin Marketing. Amber’s primary role at Hanapin is managing
pay per click and search engine optimization campaigns
for a wide range of clients. She also writes for PPC Hero,
Hanapin’s blog on the pay per click industry.


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