Boosting your Quality Score with Keyword & Ad Relevancy

One of the things often overlooked by PPC search marketers is the enormous impact that the relevance of each keyword to its ad group and creative has on your Quality Score.

The following diagram illustrates how a strong relationship between all components of your PPC campaign leads to increased click through rates, relevancy, conversion metrics and Quality Score.

Consider these relationships:

Keyword: Asus laptops
Ad group: Notebooks
Ad text:

Notebooks on Sale
Great selection of notebooks
Amazing Prices. Buy Now!
www.addisplayurl.com

Clearly, there’s little connection between the keyword and ad group. The ideal ad would have both the ad group and the ad text focusing on the keywords “Asus” and “laptops”.

Is this attempt any better?

Keyword: Asus laptops
Ad group: Laptops
Ad text:

Great range of Laptops
Our online store offers great prices
on an amazing range of Laptops.
www.addisplayurl.com

There’s no great improvement. Again, the relationship between the ad group and the ad text is not made explicit. While the “laptops” term matches the user’s query the all-important brand “Asus” is completely left out of the ad.

We can simplify the keyword and ad relevancy process by breaking it down into 3 steps.

1. Focus your ad groups by segmenting your keywords into appropriate groups. The more tightly focused your ad group, the easier it is to create a targeted ad.

   For the greatest precision you would ideally create one ad group per keyword. This does depend to some extent on what you’re marketing and what your objective is. In my experience it would be unwise to put more than 20 keywords in an ad group.





2. It’s important to use your keyword in your ads - if possible in both your ad title and text. This ensures that there is a clear relationship between the user’s search query and the ad.

   This provides a far better search experience as the searcher sees the exact results that they’ve asked for.

   Going back to our previous example, for a search term of “Asus laptops”, a targeted ad would be something like:

   Asus Laptops on Sale
   See our great range of Asus laptops
   at incredible prices. Get yours now!
   www.addisplayurl.com

3. Make sure that your visitors are sent to a landing page that also contains the keyword. (We’ll look more closely at landing pages in the next post.)

To make sure that you’ve achieved the optimal keyword relevancy ask yourself this question:

Is it possible to write one ad that would apply for every keyword in this ad group?

If the answer’s no, then you should immediately reconsider your ad groups. You could concentrate your ad group further by making new ad groups for the keywords that don’t fit. Ask yourself the same question. Keep working at it until you’re able to answer yes. Then you’ll have it right.

For Example

An ad group of ‘low cost keywords’ contains these keywords:

Discount widgets
Discount widget
Budget widgets
Budget widget
Cheap widgets
Cheap widget

One all-inclusive ad for all of the above search terms is not optimal. Ideally, you’d create three different ad groups - discount widgets, budget widgets and cheap widgets.

Each ad group then has ads targeted to the main keywords.


Structuring Campaigns

The relevancy chain is so important that it makes sense to build it into our campaign structure.

Make your campaigns easier to measure and more effective by using what we’ve learned about keyword and ad relevance. Create a themed campaign using targeted keywords, ad groups and ad creative and you’ll also find it contributes to your Quality Score.

Campaign Building tools like SpeedPPC can position your campaigns for better Quality Score. If you want powerful campaigns with far greater profits (who doesn’t?) then a tool like SpeedPPC can help you achieve greater Quality Score with lower minimum bids, while using less of your precious time.

* In the next post we’ll go further with the relevancy chain and consider how we can achieve higher Quality Score with better landing page quality.