Google Quality Score - Beating Adwords Part 3

In part one of Beating Adwords I explained that Google rewards you with lower priced clicks if it sees a good relevance between your keywords, your ads and your landing pages.

It actually score this relevency with a rating and this it calls the Quality Score.

You can see the Quality Score for each of your keywords by following the steps I explain in my guide to Google Quality Score.

This score can be either Great, OK or Poor. Obviuously we are looking for a Great score for our keywords.

If you have set up your Adwords campaigns as I showed you in part 1 and part 2 then you will have a lot of Great Keywords and a few OK ones. You should not have any Poor keywords. If you do then the best tactic is to move them into their own Adgroup and write some new keyword focused ads or new landing pages specifically for that keyword.

However it's very important to realise that Google continues to monitor your keywords and it will recalculate your Quality Score.

Now you might think that if you don't change the ads or the landing pages then your quality score will always reamin the same.

Wrong!

There is another variable that Google starts to check once you have a campaign running. It starts to look at the click through rate that your keywords are getting.

If your keywords are getting a good click through rate then it will look favourably on that keyword. You might even be able to improve an OK keyword to a Great keyword if your click through rate is good. Certainly you will see the price of your clicks drop or alternatively your ad will start to appear higher up the page for that keyword for more or less the same price.

Of course the opposite is true. If you are not getting a good click through rate, then your Quality Score is likely to suffer. The price you are paying for your clicks will need to increase to keep you at the same position on the page.

Pay more now to save later

So, how do you get a good click through rate and protect your Quality Score?

One of my favourite tricks is to pay over the odds for my clicks when I start a new campaign. This gets me high on the page in the early days of the campaign and as we know a high position tends to attract more clicks.

So for the first week or so I pay more for my clicks than I would want. Over time Google registers my high click through rate and also the high relevancy of keyword to ad to landing page. It starts to drop the price I need to pay to still get the same position on the page.

At this point you have a choice. Leave your bid where it is and climb higher or drop your price and maintain your postion. What you do is really your choice as it depends on how mcuh budget you have and how much revenue those clicks are generating.

What happens if no one is clicking on my ads

If you have followed my advice for creating keyword focussed ads in part 1 of the guide on Beating Adwords then it's unlikely you will struggle to get clicks. However sometimes your ads need a little help.

With this in mind, I've suggest you read my guide on Clickable Ads

 

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