Once you have got to grips with setting up the Adwords account you can optimise your website further in relation to the quality score. 

Google Adwords – The Beginners Guide.

Increase your quality score by increasing your CTR

Increasing the quality score reduces the costs of each bid so as a business, this is important to grasp and constantly monitor to the get most out of your money and Adwords. In order to increase your quality score you will need to increase your click through rates (CTR), this is measured by dividing the number of people who clicked on your advert with the number of times the ad was delivered to the Google search page (impressions).

Click Through Rates

• 1% is an acceptable rate, this is 1 bid out of 100 impressions
• 5% is a good rate, this is 5 bids out of 100 impressions
• 10% is an excellent rate, this is 10 bids out of 100 impressions

Your click through rate can be measured in a variety of ways, these are; keywords, adverts, campaigns, your domain and your keyword performance history. All the ways of improving these are quite simple when you know how, so I am here to help you.

Keyword CTR

To improve any keywords CTR, you will need more people to click on the ad that your keyword prompts. You can achieve this by increasing the amount you are paying for each keyword bid, so that your advert will appear higher in the search engines rankings and writing an advert that appeals to more people within your audience.

The pink areas are sponsored links, these companies have payed Google to guarentee them a top position on the Google search results page (impressions page). Below the sponsored links are two normal adverts, they will be using keywords and/or keyword bids to secure their place on the impressions page. The green highlighed areas show their keywords and phrases used. So for example the advert at the bottom may be paying more for its keyword bids than the advert above. In this instance the advert paying more per bid is seen below due to the advert above using stronger, more successful keywords (this is only an example scenario). This is why it is so important to do your keyword perfomance research before placing bids, or you could find your self spending an arm and a leg on poor keywords which will in turn be reducing your quality score.  

Advert CTR

To improve your adverts CTR, you should add more keywords that are relevant to the advert group so that it will get seen more often and again writing an advert that will appeal to more people.

In the example above, the green areas highlight the descriptions used. These incorporate keywords and phrases to attract your target market and create potential clients. Use benefits as well as the services you offer; lose weight, workouts for muscle building, fat burning. This is explained in more detail in previous post - Google Adwords – The Beginners Guide.

Google Adwords measures your CTR on all your campaigns throughout the whole of your account, so to improve here you should delete all the keywords that are not performing. If you remove all the keywords that are not getting more than around 200 impressions and get no bids or conversions at all, you should begin to notice that your click through rate and quality score will increase because those keywords are no longer bringing you down.

Be patient!

Google Adwords tracks your domain performance so you will not increase your quality score by creating a new account, with all of the same content. You need to bite the bullet and find the underlying problem, however long and painful it may be it’s always worth it in the end.

Google Adwords also tracks your keywords performance history, obviously many of your keywords will have been used millions of times in other adverts and campaigns. The click through rate that has been achieved in the past with this keyword will affect your own CTR so test them using the “traffic estimator” tool. Using this tool will give you an insight to how many clicks that keyword will expect a day (multiply this by 30 for each day per month).

Then test them in the “keyword tool” this will then give you an indication to the number of searches expected for the keyword per month (divide by 30 for per day). If these scores are low than have a rethink unless you are sure that they are relevant to what you are offering within your advert and campaign.  As seen in image below the “traffic estimator” tool is located in the 'Opportunities' page on Google Adwords in the side menu on the left hand side and the “keyword tool” is also located in the 'Opportunities' page on Google Adwords in the side menu on the left hand side.

The important thing to remember during the process of improving your quality score is that each click through rate is only one small part of the process used to measure your quality score so it’s a good idea to work on each section to be guaranteed a result. Also remember that nothing will happen immediately as Google reviews your performance over time, so it could take a couple of weeks for these improvements to emerge and take full effect. It is a bit of a waiting game but hold tight and let Adwords work for you.

5 Top Tips for Google Adwords

1. Add new groups of adverts within one campaign using similar keywords, you could use the keyword tool to help you find more relevant key terms. This can help to optimise certain areas of your business that you are advertising.
2. There is a synonyms box in the Descriptive words or phrases option, it is always checked by default. This means it might suggest sports club as a synonym for the keyword gym. If you uncheck the box, the tool will suggest only keywords that contain at least one of the terms that you entered.
3. Find keywords based on the content of your site. Rather than using your own keywords, try using the Website Content option. Enter your URL, or of any site related to your business and the AdWords system will scan your page or the selected page and suggest appropriate keywords.
4. Things to look out for when it comes to adding keywords and varying words people might use to search - synonoyms, plurals, different verb tenses (example; exercise - exercising), common misspellings (barbeque - bar-bi-que), hyphenated words, adjectives (new, brand new, cheap, free), website names (gym.com)
5. Do not rush this process; you will begin to see improvements over time, not over night. Use the tools that are available to you and don’t increase or add keyword bids until you are sure they will be beneficial for you and your business; why pay for good results when you can achieve them for free?

Essential Links

Google Adwords create an account here

Keyword Tool