Improve your Quality Score
01/25/2010
Quality score was introduced by search engines looking to receive maximum yield from advertising. By understanding the search engines’ approach, you can take steps to improve your ROI, independent of your bidding strategy..
Every paid search ad that goes unclicked represents a lost opportunity for the search engines to make money. The search engines use quality score to minimize this loss; ads with a higher clickthrough rate receive a higher quality score. This incentivizes marketers to optimize the relevance of their ad copy to specific keywords, allowing search engines to increase yield and paid click rates.
Visitors are more likely to click on ads that are relevant to their keyword search. Hence, more clicks lead to a higher quality score. This whole act in itself is completely independent from your bids, making quality score vital to your search campaigns.
Boosting quality score is easier said than done.
Maximize your Keywords Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
Clickthrough rate is one of the most important factors contributing to your overall quality score. One of the simplest ways to dramatically increase CTR is to cut out the irrelevant impressions that your keywords are being exposed to.
To do this you should regularly review 'raw search queries' that drive traffic to your site. These are the actual queries that visitors type into the search bar before clicking on your ads. You may find clicks on your ads triggered by keywords unrelated to your business, resulting in a low CTR and a lowered quality score. To prevent these unwanted clicks (and cost), add negative keywords to cut out these unwanted impressions.
Protect your star performing keywords
The overall CTR and relevance of keywords within your ad groups contribute to your quality score. Your best performing keywords could easily be dragged down by other keywords that are not performing as well. Once you have identified these star performers, protect them by removing other lower performers from the group and placing them in their own ad group. This will leave your star keywords to flourish in the existing ad group.