So what is AdWords Quality score and what can you do to improve it?

Your keywords‘ quality score is equally as important as the maximum cost per click (CPC) when deciding where your ad will be ranked. Google decides your ad position using this multiplier – Quality Score x Max CPC.

5 Things you should know about the AdWords Quality Score

1. When you first upload a keyword, it will be given an average quality score for that keyword over Google’s networks
2. The single largest factor in the Quality Score Statistic is the historic Click Through Rate (CTR). This affects the Quality Score at all levels in an account (keyword, ad group, campaign and account). Therefore, a keyword’s individual quality score can be affected if the rest of your account is performing poorly (or well, of course).
3. The relevance of the Ad Text and Landing Page content to the keyword will improve Quality Score.
4. Landing page load time will affect Quality Score too – time to sort out that web host and remove those huge images that take ages to load!
5. If your keyword does not have enough traffic to reach a threshold (unhelpfully, Google doesn’t define this threshold), this can reduce the Quality Score.

5 Ways to Improve Your AdWords Quality Score

1. Use dynamic keyword insertion in your ads to make them as relevant as possible. Dynamic keyword insertion only works if your keyword has a quality score of greater than 3.
2. Group highly relevant keywords together to keep the traffic high for each Ad Group.
3. Where possible, make highly specific landing pages for your keywords.
4. Delete or pause poorly performing keywords, or move them to more relevant ad groups with more relevant ads, landing on more relevant landing pages.
5. Try adding phrase and / or broad match variations of exact match keywords you are bidding on to increase traffic volume.

Google is More than Google Search

An option in the settings for each campaign, it is important to understand the impact of selecting this option. Left at its default setting, ads will run on three networks,  Google search, Google search partners and the Display Network.

The Display network represents a very different strategy to Search, has different objectives and a significantly different structure and approach to Search. Google contextually matches your ads with content on forums, discussion boards, advice sites, news sites and much more.

Display can and does produce great results, but if you’re new to AdWords, turn it off for now and come back to it later. Otherwise, it should at least be targeted using a separate campaign with its own budget and performance metrics.

Targeting Local Customers

For businesses that target a local area, this function is extremely beneficial. Ideal for plumbers, plasterers, hairdressers and PC repairs, but there are many more. If you’re a plumber in London, this allows you to exclude searches on Google from locations outside of London, for example.

Combined with a separate keyword strategy of bidding only on search terms which include places your business can service, you’ll ensure that clicks are highly relevant and improve performance.

Using Highly Relevant Keywords

When selecting which keywords to use in your campaign, there is one simple rule to follow to ensure your traffic is relevant: only use keywords which are precisely what you provide in terms of products or services featured on your website.

For example, if you sell a range of hand knitted jumpers, there’s little point in bidding on “jumpers” – it represents far too many other products that you don’t sell. Better to qualify this as “hand knitted jumpers”, “knitted jumpers”, “woolly jumpers”, “ladies knitted jumpers”, which would be much more accurate and produce greater ROI.

Keywords which are not exactly what you provide are much less likely to convert into sales, leads or enquiries – you’ll most likely burn your budget with little to show for it.

Relevance is Critical

For best performance, organise your keywords in to tightly themed groups and show highly relevant ads. Google will respect your relevance and so will the audience. You’ll get a much higher CTR, higher ad positions, more clicks and more sales. Grouping terms together like this is the purpose of an Ad Group in your account – use it!

Using the jumpers example, you would create an ad group for all the “knitted jumper” keywords with a knitted jumper ad, a group for  the “woolly jumper” keywords  with woolly jumper ads and “ladies knitted jumpers” in a group with ladies’ knitted jumper ads.

Landing Page Selection

Selecting the most relevant page on your site is a great way of making the search process simpler, quicker and easier. If the search is “ladies knitted  jumper” land them on the ladies knitted  jumpers page. Google rewards your relevance with a better quality score and higher ad positions, your customer has a better experience and is more likely to convert in to an enquiry or a sale.

Read more of the basics at: AdWords Basics Part Two.

Having changed the broad match algorithm a number of times in recent years, we’ve always recommended caution when bidding on broad matches, instead preferring phrase and exact match keywords with a smaller number of broads which need careful, regular management to succeed.

Recently, Google rolled out the “broad match modifier” to tighten up the way in which it matches broad keywords.

What is the broad match modifier?

First, you need to understand that a standard broad match also includes “expanded matching”. For example, the word ‘shoe’ in your keyword could also expand to slipper, boot, stiletto, brogue, trainers and the word ‘ladies’ might also match girls, womens, divas. Multiply those variations out and you’ll get a huge range of variations your broad keyword could match – some relevant, some irrelevant.

With that in mind, ideally you should be bidding on all of those relevant variations anyway and hopefully, Google will match the right search with the right keyword (it won’t always).

It is easy to see how the expanded match could cause problems in the accuracy of your targeting. The broad match modifier seems to be an attempt to use the broad match algorithm without expanded match, which is great news.

How to use the broad match modifier

To use it, you’ll just need a ‘+’ in front of each specific word in your keyword. e.g. +ladies + shoes. Google will match typos, plurals and other variations; ladys shoes, ladies shoe, shoes for ladies, shoe lady etc, but will no longer match womens and girls or boots and slippers as it would with the expanded match.

It is also possible, therefore, to modify specific words in your keyword, but not others if you wish; e.g. ladies +shoes uses expandedmatch on ‘ladies’, but not on ‘shoes’.

As ever, try it with care, test it and measure it.

Would we advocate changing all broads to use the broad match modifier? It depends on your market, your product, your budget, your strategy and how advanced your campaign is already. Best to discuss that with one of our analysts.

If you don’t already have conversion tracking implemented correctly, you’ll need to resolve that to make use of Search Funnels.

You can find Search Funnels for your account on the Reports tab on the Conversions page in the left navigation.

This is a pretty simple premise, but scratch the surface and there’s a rich seam of data. Here’s the low-down:

By default, you’ll be shown the last 30 days’ data, but you can change the date range as you might expect. If yours is a longer sales cycle, looking at the most recent data might skew your results and analysis, so factor that in.

Aside from the number of conversions, there are three interesting figures here; average ad impressions to conversion, average ad clicks to conversion and most importantly, average days to conversion. This last one surprised us when we first got access to this data, which will vary depending on your product or service, the market competition, the cost/value and of course the keywords that you bid on and the overall performance of your campaigns.

Knowing that visitors typically click more than one ad also puts some context to the performance of specific keywords. We’re often asked, “why not bid only on those keywords that convert most effectively?” This data helps to demonstrate that the conversion is often achieved through more than just one keyword and one click.

The conversion is only allocated to the last click – take away those search terms that position your offer through the search funnel and your offer loses some of its impact. Take away the frequency of your ad being seen for every relevant search and your CTR and conversion rates go down and the cost per conversion more likely to rise rather than decrease as you might expect.

In short, if your ad appears consistently for each of four relevant searches, and your competitor only appears once or twice, it is more likely that you’ll get the click AND the conversion rather than your competitor. It’s the cumulation of seeing your ad multiple times that wins the game, not one search, one ad one click (wouldn’t that be so much simpler?).

The knowledge that customers take a number of days to convert also helps to build a strategy to address that conversion rate. In this example, an average 5-day funnel suggests that remarketing should influence the rate at which visitors return and also position your site more firmly in their memory when they make that decision to buy or enquire.

There really is enough science and psychology to write a book, but to summarise:

• Conversion tracking is required to use Search Funnels
• Analyse a date range that ends before your average days to conversion to avoid mis-diagnosis
• Investigate paths to understand what visitors search for before they convert
• Build this knowledge in to your strategy using the other tools at your disposal such as remarketing and Content Network campaigns.

On the one hand, searchers already want to buy from you and might well find you in organic links where the clicks are free, so why pay for the click?

On the other, there may be competitors bidding on your brand and stealing your profit from right under your nose if you don’t.

There isn’t a right or wrong answer, but there some factors you may want to consider;

Google knows that this is your domain name and/or your brand, so it’s very easy for you to achieve top paid position.

Clicks on your own brand keywords tend to cost pennies – we’ve often seen clicks at £0.05 for position one.

CTR, as critical as ever, is typically awesome – 25-50% CTR, which won’t do your overall campaign CTR any harm at all.

In one of our most advanced campaigns, our client makes over 100 sales every month on one single competitor keyword for less than £0.20 a click.

Whether you like the ethics or not, there’s profit waiting on the table.

Learn more advanced techniques in Google AdWords Masterclasses.

So what are session-based keywords?

Google says:

“When determining which ads to show on a Google search result page, the AdWords system evaluates some of the user’s previous queries during their search session as well as the current search query. If the system detects a relationship, it will show ads related to these other queries, too.”

So this means that, assuming there aren’t more relevant ads to show for these later searches, Google will show your ad instead. Mostly, I would imagine that this doesn’t happen too often – most of the time, there will be other people bidding on the secondary terms.

Example: you’re bidding on “car tyres” and the user searches for “car tyres“; it shows your ad. However, the user then qualifies their search further, “peugeot car tyres“, which shows your Peugeot Car Tyres ad. The user hasn’t clicked yet and now searches for “peugeot 406 1.9 diesel 2004“. You’re not bidding on this because it isn’t relevant enough to your market, and neither is anyone else (except maybe ebay et al.)

At this point, Google shows your car tyres ad again because at some point in the search session, the user did type in your keyword. Google feels that they are still searching the same theme and your ads are still relevant, so it shows them.

Should I bid on session based keywords?

You shouldn’t necessarily bid on these keywords, only if they are specifically relevant.

Can I switch off Session-Based keywords?

No. There is no option to do this, but like expanded keyword matching, it does only work with broad match keywords.

Why do Session-Based keywords have such a high CTR on the Search Query Report?
It is important to understand the context of this measurement. Remember that the Search Query Report only reports data for keywords that have generated clicks – it won’t show you data for session-based matches which have shown your ads, but not generated a click, hence the high CTR.

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