The Importance Of Quality Scores In PPC
One of the biggest mistakes that new business entrants make in the pay per click market is impatience. They build a site, then, often with the aid of a free $50 or more Adwords offer, start a pay per click campaign. Unfortunately, pay per click does not run like a normal newspaper classified ads. Each of the search engine pay per click markets publish ads based on a score given to each ad – Google, for example, calls theirs a quality score.
Some of the factors that go into a quality score include click through rates, page quality, ad relevance, geographic terms, and landing page load times. Each search engine has their own secret formula for determining this quality score. The exact formula for them determining an ad’s placement is not known, but it could be as simple as your bid value times your quality score.
With that formula in mind, you can see that a high quality score can outrank another ad, even though the bid price is lower. There are other benefits to a high quality score including:
- more clicks for the same budget
- higher placement leading to a higher click through rate
- lower costs for better quality keywords
- better conversions
The last comes, not so much because of your quality score, but because of the work put into your site to gain that quality score. For example, creating a better, faster and more relevant landing page should lead to more conversions when compared to a click just landing on a home page.
For new business owners, it is far more prudent to wait a little longer, to develop a top quality landing page, and to then use any free offers to test out a small range of keywords. If they attract clicks and conversions, you will be on the road to earning an income which you can then use to extend your campaign. Use the approach I outlined in the first paragraph, and you will find your free offer gone with little or no conversions and probably a bad taste in the mouth over pay per click.
PPC: A Lesson In Exact Match
If you want to increase your quality score with Google Pay Per Click advertising, AdWords, there are several ways to do it, but I like this one best – use exact match.
Dave Davis gives you 10 ways to improve your quality score, but here’s what he says about matching options:
Our client was only using broad match for their keywords in their campaign. We added exact match and phrase match keywords to each ad group and chose which of the three had a better QS and lower minimum CPC and deleted the other two matching options. In the majority of cases, exact match won.
In our experience, exact match is almost always the way to go. Broad match keywords will show your ad for too many search queries that are irrelevant and you inevitably end up with bad clicks. That lowers your quality score and you have a downward spiral of effectiveness in your PPC campaign. With exact match, it is just the opposite. Fewer clicks, but a higher CTR, which results in a higher quality score and lower costs.
Don’t play around with PPC. Use exact match unless there is a real compelling reason to do otherwise.
How Many Keywords Can You Manage With PPC?
Google is getting stricter with its quality score. Recently, the search engine announced that you will hurt your quality score if you try to target too many keywords with one ad. The search engine wants you to target a specific web page with each keyword. The result for many webmasters could be a new PPC campaign for every keyword they want to target.
But that’s not to say that you’ll have to target a different keyword for every PPC campaign under every circumstances. In most cases, a tight keyword group within a PPC campaign will boost your quality score and give you maximum performance,l but you have to manage the campaign in the right way.
Your targeted web pages should be managed around a tight keyword group consisting of keywords that are related. We’re talking about a small keyword group – about 5 or 6 keywords. If you try to manage a single PPC campaign around hundreds of keywords that are broadly related then you will hurt your quality score and your ad rankings and click-throughs will suffer.
How You Are Judged In PPC
Many would-be Internet marketers are a little confused about pay-per-click marketing. It is assumed that because it is keyword-based like SEO then the rules are the same. That’s actually not the case.
With search engine optimization, you are judged by how well your website is optimized by both on-page and off-page factors. You are judged by things that are both in your control and outside of your control. With PPC, you are judged entirely by things that are within your control. However, your placement on the page is judged by things outside of your control.
Let me explain.
A good PPC campaign begins with a list of keywords. You first have to build a landing page that is optimized for your keywords. Maybe not all of them, but enough of them. Next, you write an ad that is designed to drive traffic to that landing page. You set a budget and bid on keywords and let your ad go live. The search engine will give your ad a quality score. That quality score is based on how well your ad and landing page work together AND whether or not visitors to your landing page stick around – your bounce rate.
You might say, wait a minute, I can’t control what my visitors do. But before you say that, consider that your visitors are reacting to your copywriting skills. If they leave your site because it is poorly designed or doesn’t meet their expectations then it’s because of what you did. You have control over that.
But even if you do everything right and you get the best quality score, your placement within the search engines is dependent upon the search engines. You may be placed high on the list due to your quality score, but if someone else achieves a higher quality score, which you can’t control, then they may actually achieve a better positioning than you.
So your ad is judged by what you do, but your placement is judged by a combination of what you do and what your competition do. Those are some things to keep in mind when planning your next PPC campaign.