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Let me introduce you to unrecognized factors that indirectly affect your Quality Score. They’re one step back from Quality Score because instead they influence the variables that are used in the Quality Score calculation.

Why bother getting to know them? Well, once you’ve improved the main Quality Score contributors (discussed in previous articles in this series), you should be looking for more ways to be competitive.

These indirect influences are well worth mastering, not just for the sake of Quality Score but to improve your conversions and reduce your costs.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) is a great tool you can use to achieve greater relevance in your ads. Greater relevancy translates to a higher click-through-rate, which is a vital ingredient of keyword Quality Score.

Now let’s get one thing straight. DKI does not directly increase or reduce your Quality Score. This is a myth.

The foundation of high Quality Scoring campaigns is a super strong link between your keywords, ads and landing pages. The more relevant your ads, the higher the click-through rate you will achieve. DKI is simply a valuable tool you’ll use to serve up relevant search results, thereby improving your CTRs which flows onto Quality Score.

Keep in mind that DKI is a tool, and you can use it effectively or abuse it.

Don’t pack your ad groups with so many keywords that you can only create targeted ads per keyword by abusing DKI. If you do that, then you’re just using it as a crutch and this will probably be reflected in your Quality Score.

To use it effectively, keep in mind the principles of creating targeted, relevant campaigns. Then use DKI to help you achieve this faster. Let’s look at the below example:

Example

If you’re marketing a variety of giftware, you may use DKI to cover the volume. Your ad may look something like this:

Get {Keyword:Alt text} Here
Huge Range of {Keyword:Alt text}
Great for all ages. Buy Now!
www.dkiexample.com

If your list of products/keywords includes the following:

Christmas Hampers
Gift Hampers
Children’s toys
Educational games
Crystal giftware
Perfume gift packs

then DKI is not being used effectively. Yes, each keyword is being inserted into your ad text, however the ad is not suited for all your keywords. Even with DKI, this is still more of a shotgun approach and won’t fool your audience.

From here, you’d need to restructure your campaign, create focused ad groups and write targeted ad copy - based on strong keyword research of course. There’s just no compromising here.

However, when you combine DKI with the above process, you’ll be launching high volume, highly relevant campaigns in a fraction of the time.

SpeedPPC gives your DKI an added advantage with a unique and sophisticated method of dynamic insertion. In comparison to regular search engine DKI, with SpeedPPC you have complete control over what search terms are inserted in your ad and landing page copy.

Using the SpeedPPC token key method makes it even quicker to create quality PPC campaigns by automatically inserting the most relevant keywords in your ads and landing pages.

So you don’t have to worry about creating the perfect campaign structure. It’s all done for you.

Negative Keywords and Match types

At first glance, you may wonder what negative keywords and match types have to do with your Quality Score. Plenty actually!

Once again, relevancy is the key. We know how much click through rate impacts Quality Score. Negative keywords and match types both contribute to relevancy and click through rate.

To explain further:

When you use negative keywords, you exclude search queries that you know are not relevant. Your ad doesn’t show so you’re reducing useless impressions. Because your click through rate is a ratio of clicks to ad impressions, you’re way ahead on improving your click through rate.

You’re basically making your ad impressions count. Your click-through rate doesn’t suffer because your ads aren’t showing on unrelated searches.

Using match types further focuses your relevancy to users’ searches. It allows you to match your ads more precisely to a search query and attract visitors that are actually searching for your product. The better targeting again improves your click through rate, Quality Score and bid cost (usually not as competitively priced as broad matched keywords).

Example

I was searching for a Motorola Q9 phone, and an ad appeared for a health store selling Co-enzyme Q10 capsules. They were obviously bidding on a product term, and possibly catering for searchers of Q9 capsules. However, by adding negative keywords for Motorola, phone, etc they could have excluded my unrelated search (and probably a few others).

By now you’ve probably realized that negative keywords and match types have almost as big an impact on your click through rate as your actual ad copy.

They’re both essential in getting your ads in front of the right people.

So protect your click through rate by using negative keywords and match types, because click through rate does have a direct impact on your Quality Score.

Consider also, Quality Score is not the only one to benefit here. By using better refined match types and cutting out the non-converting clicks you’re saving yourself a heap of dollars that you can throw at higher quality traffic.

Account Quality Score

Your Account Quality Score is an overall summary of your keyword Quality Scores.

More importantly, when you introduce new search terms where there is little historical data, your Account Quality Score is a deciding factor on how much your minimum bids are. The better your Account Quality Score, the lower your minimum bid prices.

If your Account Quality Score has historically been Poor, then you could get hit with higher bid costs to get new keywords active.

As a pro-active PPC marketer that frequently tries out new search terms, you’ll want the huge savings you’ll accumulate from lower starting bids.

Keyword Quality Score and Account Quality Score are linked and interdependent.

Your individual Keyword Quality Scores contribute to your Account Quality Score.

Your Account Quality Score impacts all your individual Keyword Quality Scores.

So while you can’t actually see your Account Quality Score, understand it’s importance and how your individual Quality Scores influence it.

Don’t make the mistake of leaving poor performing keywords in your account thinking they’re not costing you anything. The flow-on effect is actually costing you.

Here’s how.

Poorly performing keywords pull down your click-through rates and consequently both your Keyword and Account Quality Scores.

The outcome is higher minimum bid costs across all keywords in your account.

Optimizing your campaigns is not just about finding new keywords and testing new ads. You also need to discard what isn’t working.

Don’t let the poor performers rot away in your campaigns. You may not see the dollar cost of it in the Average CPC column, but you can be sure you are paying the price for it.

Diagnosing high minimum bid prices is clearer when you understand your keyword Quality Score. You’ll find it far cheaper to raise your Quality Score rather than hiking up your bids.

I hope this series has helped you understand the direct and indirect factors contributing to Quality Score. Your Quality Score is certainly within your control.

Now you should look at your PPC campaigns with fresh eyes. Identify which Quality Score factors need improvement. Then plan a strategy for improving each area. Finally, make time to measure the effect on performance.

This process will cost you far less than the time and money you’ll gain from it.

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.

Click through rate (CTR) is probably a very familiar term to you by now. It’s basically how many times your ad was clicked, compared to the number of ad impressions.

This simple percentage figure has a pretty big impact on your Quality Score.

Any good tracking software should show you CTRs, however if you’re calculating it manually then this is the formula:

The way CTRs affect your Quality Score is like a popularity contest. When a person clicks on your ad, in effect they are ‘voting’ for it, telling Google that it was relevant to their search. Google records this and kudos to your account.

When Google calculates Quality Score, your CTRs are taken into account (not including Content network) for the entire history of each keyword, not just for a certain period.

So you can see why it’s crucial to monitor search terms and take action on any low-performing keywords.

When deciding the relative value of click through rates, the below criteria are considered and weighted accordingly:

1. CTR history is weighted so although a keyword’s whole history matters, the most recent CTRs are more important - this is an extra incentive to continually improve your campaigns! It also means that all is not lost if you want to resurrect old keywords.

2. CTRs will be different depending on ad rank. Google does not equally compare the CTR of an ad positioned on the right hand side, with an ad appearing above the natural search results.

   The variance in ad rankings is taken into account. For example, in the search results below a 2% CTR for position 8 would be great, 2% in position 6 is still alright, but 2% in position 1 would be quite disappointing. The same CTR is weighted according to the ad rank.



3. Search terms - usually the more specific a search term is, the better the CTR should be because you are more closely matching a user’s search query.

   A very broad or general search term would be expected to have a lower CTR as the SERPS may not be specifically what the user had intended, and so the ads are not as relevant.

   The exact same CTR figure may be considered low or high depending on the search terms used, eg. 0.8% may be satisfactory for a broad search term, but quite low for a long tail search phrase, where the user’s intent is fairly obvious.

   For Example
   Broad search term - tv (0.8% CTR understandable - users could be searching for ‘tv’ for many different purposes - to purchase, rent, repair, look up tv guides, etc)
   however
   Long tail search term - plasma tv repairs Brooklyn (0.8% CTR fairly poor)

There are a number of variables you should look at to improve CTRs. Funnily enough, these are also the same areas you’d address to improve your Quality Score.

Next week we look at How to Boost Your Quality Score with Keyword & Ad Relevancy, and then:

• Achieving Higher Quality Score with Better Landing Page Quality
• Indirect Quality Score Influences

Have a look at your account now and become familiar with your various click through rates. Then look closely at the relationship between your CTR and Quality Score. You can always better your CTRs and you should, because they’re your ticket to better Quality Score.

What’s your first reaction when I say “Quality Score”?

If you’re already Quality Score savvy, you may have considered it the arrival of a long lost friend. Or maybe it’s one you wished had stayed lost. For others, Quality Score is still something of an enigma.

Whatever your current knowledge (or opinion) is of Quality Score, we’re going to put it under the microscope and dissect its parts.

A common myth is there is only one type of Quality Score. There are in fact a few, which include:

• Account Quality Score
• Search Campaign Quality Score
• Content Campaign Quality Score
• Landing Page Quality Score
• Ad Group Quality Score
• Ad Text Quality Score
• Keyword Quality Score

In this series, we’ll be focusing on Keyword Quality Score, which is currently the only score you can view inside your AdWords account.

If you know how to work with it Quality Score can be one of your best competitive advantages. It’s also one of the most cost-effective optimization methods since it doesn’t require you to spend more (in fact it could reduce your costs!). There are not many methods of significantly improving your PPC campaigns without throwing more dollars at them. So read on!

What is Quality Score?

Google defines Quality Score as “a dynamic variable assigned to each of your keywords. It’s calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower its minimum bid and the better its ad position.”

In simple terms, it’s a rating of how “good” a keyword is based on a set of criteria.

What’s Quality Score Used For?

With relevancy being Google’s middle name, it’s not surprising that Quality Score is designed to provide a better experience to users by displaying more relevant search results.

For users, Quality Score is another way of making sure relevant and topical ads are presented.

As advertisers, Quality Score is used to determine three things:

1. Your minimum CPC bid
2. Keyword status/whether your ad runs or not
3. Your ad’s ranking position

I’m sure you’ll agree these are all pretty important to your campaigns!

Why you should take the time to learn about Quality Score

Is Quality Score something you need to worry about? Well consider that a poor Quality Score means higher bid prices, less ad impressions and lower positions when the ad is displayed. It’s hard to put a positive spin on any of that!

A higher Quality Score lowers your minimum bid prices and raises your ad rankings. Conversions and more importantly ROI, are both improved by a higher Quality Score.

The example below shows how Quality Score can affect your minimum bid cost and ad position, rather than the CPC determining everything else.

It’s a competitive and sometimes crowded market place, so no matter what business you’re in, any advantage is great right? Right.

When they introduced Quality Score, Google leveled the playing field somewhat. Ad ranking is no longer about how much money you can throw at your campaign. Smarter, better campaigns are rewarded which enables SMEs to compete in the same space with the “big boys”. Sound good to you? It should!

Where do I find my Quality Score?

To find out what your Quality Scores are, just log-in to your Google Adwords account, then view your keyword listings. From the “show/hide” columns drop-down, select “Show Quality Score” and a new column will be added after keywords showing a score of Poor, OK or Great.

How is Quality Score calculated?

Keyword Quality Score has many contributing factors based on both relevancy and performance. It’s a dynamic variable which is dependent on other dynamic variables including:

1. Click through rate (excluding Content Network)
2. Relevancy of keywords and ad copy
3. Landing page/web site quality and relevancy*
4. Your Account’s Historical performance (based on CTR across all keywords and ads)
5. Other Relevancy Factors

* Quality Score for keyword minimum CPC differs from the Quality Score used to determine ad ranking. Most factors are the same, however Landing Page Quality is not used in ad ranking Quality Score.

We can only take a stab at the “other relevancy factors” - IP targeting, geo-targeting, demographic targeting, ad scheduling could be influencers. A Google Engineer once said “There are over 100 factors that can affect Quality Score. However, not all will be triggered depending on the conditions involved”.

Over the next 4 weeks we’ll be delving deeper into Quality Score, focusing on variables 1-4. These are the ones we have some control over.

So check back for our series of weekly articles on:

• Raise Your Click Through Rates for Better Quality Score
• Keyword & Ad Relevancy – How They Boost Your Quality Score
• Achieve Higher Quality Score with Better Landing Page Quality
• Indirect Quality Score Influences – Do You Know Them?

If you haven’t yet gotten to know your Quality Scores, log-in to your account now and display your Quality Score column. Are yours Poor, OK or Great?

Great Quality Score is your key to more effective and profitable campaigns with lower bid costs.