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Archive for the ‘Google AdWords Quality Score’ Category

Have you ever truly thought about what your overall account Quality Score looks like and how it has affected your PPC account over the years?

The more I manage long term clients the more I realize everything I do today will greatly effect what happens to my account Quality Score in the future.

Achieving a great Quality Score does not happen overnight. It may take a week, a month or longer. But by constantly optimizing your PPC account over time you will see the effects of having a great Quality Score. Those effects are mainly seen in the cost it takes to get your PPC ads in higher positions. Over time, your costs should be less, and your ads should have higher placements.

I mainly work with my ad groups and ad texts to achieve a great Quality Score. And lately my new Google rep mentioned something to me that I don’t think I realized before.

She mentioned that paused or deleted ads/keywords do still have an effect on your account Quality Scores. Now I could have sworn my Google reps before told me that paused and deleted ads or keywords do not have a negative or positive effect on your quality scores because they’re no longer active. After all, you’re supposed to pause or delete poor performing ads/keywords; so why would a paused or deleted ad/keyword still negatively affect your Quality Score?

To add to this, even Adwords Pro Sarah on 11/5/09 mentions that although pausing or deleting have the same effect, that if you pause or delete a group of great performing keywords, your Quality Score would be based on the ok and poor performing keywords in that ad group, and no longer the great performing keywords you paused.

You’re right- there is no difference between deleting and pausing in terms of Quality Score. The only real way you could see an affect is in a scenario like this: you have 100 keywords, 50 performing well, 25 performing ok and 25 performing poorly. If you paused all 50 high performing keywords, your account quality score when then be calculated from the ok and poor performing keyword- so you would see a drop in the overall account Quality Score. That said, if you reverse the scenario and only pause the poor keywords, you could see a positive affect.

(AdwordsPro Sarah).

If anyone was under the impression that paused or deleted keywords or ads didn’t have an effect on your overall account Quality Score, please throw that out the window.

The following is a statement from my Adwords rep stating when to pause and/or delete ads/keywords in order to achieve a higher account Quality Score:

The historical performance of paused or deleted ads and keywords will continue to affect your account history. However, we still recommend deleting poorly performing ads and keywords to improve Quality Score. This will prevent the ads and keywords from performing poorly in the future and further affecting your account history. As the rest of your account accrues more performance history over time, the impact that the deleted ads and keywords have on your Quality Score will diminish.

I think it’s a good idea to delete poor Quality Score keywords and ads so they don’t accidently get resumed for some reason. Just note that in Adwords you can still resume deleted ads/keywords – so be careful of that.

If you’re really trying to increase your click-through rates (as you should be) delete those old poor performing ads, and continue writing new ads to test to increase your click-through rates. That should help over power old deleted ads or keywords that have lower Quality Scores.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

I have clients and potential new clients ask me all the time how can they improve their quality scores in their Google, Yahoo and MSN PPC accounts. Quality Score is based off of relevance to the users search query and user experience. The higher your quality score is, technically the lower you pay for your clicks and the higher you can get in position in paid advertising. Below are my top 5 tips on how to generate a higher quality score:

1. Increase your click-through rates. No matter what, never stop testing your ads. If you have your ads set to optimize in Google, Yahoo and Bing, make sure you set them up to rotate. This will allow the search engines to not favor one well-performing ad over the other, but instead they will rotate ads 50/50. You want to rotate your ads 50/50 to test different messages. Each new message you test could mean an increase in click-through rates, which means a higher quality score.
2. Don’t Ditch your account. Ever wonder if you should just start from scratch? Well, more than likely you shouldn’t. By ditching your account and starting over you’re losing all of your account history, the good and the bad. The only time you should be ditching your account is if your current quality scores are terrible, and I mean terrible.
3. Keep things organized. One way to help achieve a higher click-though rate is to have fewer keywords in an ad group. This will allow your ad text to display the actual keyword in your ad group, which will make it more targeted and relevant to the user, improving your click-through rates. Take a look at some of your largest ad groups, and see if there are keywords that can be broken out into new, more targeted ad groups. It’s okay to only have 3 – 5 keywords per ad group. If you use Adwords Editor it makes this process of moving keywords much easier and faster.
4. Remove under performing keywords and ads. If you have a paused keyword or paused ad, Google has stated that keyword or ad does not reflect your account quality score. Therefore, pause away at under performing ads with low click-through rates and keywords with low click-through rates and low impressions all together. This will help clean up your account to where you only have some of your better performing keywords with higher click-through rates active and generating a quality score.
5. Keep your keywords in check. Quality score is essentially how well your keywords relate to your ads, and how your keywords and ads relate to your landing pages. I have several clients that have keywords that are no where to be found on their landing pages. You must have the keyword on your landing page!
6. Load times do matter. Quality score is also about creating a great user experience. Having a slow landing page load time can influence your quality scores. Be sure your landing page loads on all browers, pc’s and mac’s within 3 seconds.

Your quality scores in Google will have a number associated to them that you can see. If you have a quality score under a 7 I would make some tweaks to those keywords and ads. Whether moving them into their own ad groups or testing more compelling ad text. Keep in mind if you’re using all three match types they will have the same quality score, but could still perform very differently. Pause which ever keyword isn’t working.

Remember achieving a good quality score takes times, nothing will happen over night. I would at least give it a few weeks to a month before you begin to see positive changes and lower costs.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

I was recently reading the Quality Score Fact of the Week over at the AdWords Agency blog. This week’s Quality Score tip inspired me to do more research and expand upon the topic that was discussed. First, here is the Fact of the Week:

Restructuring your account does not cause you to lose your historical Quality Score information. The historical performance of your keywords, ads, and landing pages is preserved when you restructure your account. Therefore, we encourage you to restructure or optimize your client’s account structure as needed.

Let me first say that I agree with this statement. The historical Quality Score for a particular keyword does transfer when the term is moved into a new ad group.

However, keep in mind that when you move a keyword you can temporarily reset its Quality Score, therefore negatively effecting your ad position and overall performance.

Why does this temporary set back occur? AdWords needs to re-acclimate to this keyword’s new location and possibly new ad text. This means that when you do a major account re-structure, you will see a fluctuation in your performance. If you have optimized your account for the better, then your performance will begin to pick up after the restructure – but it will take a little time.

Another reason a temporary set back can occur is due to the relationship between your keyword and ad text. As your keyword builds its click-through rate, it is invariably tied to a specific ad text within your ad group. In a way, they share the Quality Score. When you move a keyword but neglect to bring the ad text with it into the new ad group, you have effectively severed that relationship.

If your keyword has performed well historically, then it will gain back its Quality Score, ad position, and performance relatively faster than a keyword that was performing poorly in another ad group, or a completely new keyword. So, what was said in the Fact of the Week is true, you won’t lose your historical Quality Score and that historical Quality Score will help you re-gain your keyword’s traction.

And this brings me to another topic on restructuring: moving a keyword that is doing poorly will not automatically help improve its performance. If you have a keyword that is relevant and has more potential if it’s in a different ad group, then move it. But if you are moving a bunch of keywords to try and reset their historical performance, that won’t work. And this is why historical performance does follow a keyword even if its moved. A bad keyword in any group is going to have a low Google AdWords Quality Score.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t restructure your account. In fact, we highly encourage you to optimize your account structure in order to enhance your account’s performance.

This is why I want to expand on this Quality Score tip. It isn’t wrong. It just doesn’t give the full picture. Restructuring your campaigns is a great to make your ad groups more focused and write better targeted ad texts. But there will be some bumps along the way.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.