Since we’re two months away from saying au revoir to 2014, I thought I’d take a few moments to update what we’ve been up to here at Oomph Media.

Since we’re a small shop, we’ve been able to spend plenty of dedicated time for each of our clients. Cody is in the process of overhauling one client’s site to improve usability. An added perk for this client (included in their monthly maintenance fee) is that we will be able to set up their landing pages to be more relevant for their AdWords campaign. In so doing, we will be able to increase keyword quality score, saving the client money.

For our other CPC clients, we check into their AdWords accounts every day to make sure there are no unexpected surprises. We also analyze their data and tweak keywords where needed. To determine what’s working and what can use improvement, we run experimental keywords along side existing keywords–maybe changing the match type–to see which keyword performs better and pausing the words that under-perform.

I (Jennifer) have been studying Google Analytics, hoping to become certified in the near future (hopefully before 2015!). Earning this certification will be another feather in our cap, showing that Oomph is constantly striving to improve our skills for our current clients as well as future ones.

Going forward, we’d like to get more blogging done. Not only here, but also on our other blog site, greathomesolutions.com. Click the Contact button on our site to get in touch and let us grow your business.

I know it’s not quite Thanksgiving yet, but I want to wish all a very happy holiday season!

Whether you’re selling goods, services, or looking to build brand awareness, relevance is a big factor in how successful your ad campaigns are. The more specific you can be on your landing pages, the higher your quality score will be. The result of which is a higher ad position for what you spend.

A user, we’ll call her Tammy, is looking for a quality cooking utensil set to see her though the next 25-40 years of her life. She prefers a set instead of individual elements since she’s really into having matching items in her kitchen. She’s leaning towards stainless, but is open to a really nice looking set of hardwood or silicone.

Here’s Tammy’s query on Google:

Theses are the ad results that are served:

Tammy picks the top ad. This is what she sees:

And pages and pages more of different types and styles of kitchen utensils. She has a lot to choose from and each of the elements on the pages are relevant to what she queried. Let’s see what happens when we choose an ad with a side, or lower ad position. We’ll use Tammy’s same query.

The third ad position garnered these results:

This is definitely not what Tammy was looking for.

I have a client who provides a service. He does installs and repairs for both residential and commercial consumers. He had a simple four page website with many of his different services listed on the same page. His ads that were for, say, iron gates would land on a page with the other irrelevant products. This affected the quality score of the ad. Our recommendation was to make different landing pages for each of the separate products and services and point the ads to the new pages.

Let’s get relevant! Contact Jen at jennifer@oomphmedia.com to get more info on making your ads match what consumers search.

^^^ This guy knows what he’s talking about.^^^

One of the first things that you learn when studying AdWords is that increasing the quality of your keywords is a free way to get a cheaper, better ad position in search results. There are three key factors that determine your quality score:

1. Click Through Rate (CTR)- How often a person who sees your ad and then clicks on it. Example: Your ad is shown 1,000 times and 10 people click on it. Your CTR is 1%. The higher your CTR, the higher your quality score will be.

2. Ad Relevancy- How relevant your keywords are to your ad. Keywords are the point of entry to a searcher. If you sell all kinds of bells (cowbells, dinner bells, etc.) and a user is searching for bell-bottom jeans and your ad comes up, something has gone wrong at the keyword level. The more closely related your keywords are to your ad, the higher your quality score.

3. Landing page quality- Does your ad for dress shoes link to a landing page full of hiking boots? If so, either your landing page or your ad needs work. If you sell all kinds of shoes, make different landing pages for each and create specific ads for those pages. The more closely related your ad and landing page is, the higher your quality score.

How do you find your quality score?

You can check your Quality Score by running a keyword diagnosis or by enabling the Qual. score column.

First, to run a keyword diagnosis:

1. Click the Campaigns tab at the top.
2. Select the Keywords tab.
3. Click the white speech bubble next to any keyword’s status to see details about that keyword’s Quality Score.

I prefer to enable the Qual. score column as I can monitor all the scores at a glance. To do this:

1. Click the Campaigns tab at the top.
2. Select the Keywords tab.
3. Look for the Qual. score column in the statistics table. If you don’t see this column in your table, you can add this column by doing the following:
   • Click the Columns drop-down menu in the toolbar above the statistics table.
   • Select Customize columns.
   • Select Attributes.
   • Click Add next to Qual. score.
   • Click Save.

In theory, you can have  a middling max CPC bid and still achieve a high ad position if you have an outstanding quality score.

]]> https://oomphmedia.com/adwords-improve-quality-score/feed/ 2 https://oomphmedia.com/adwords-begin/ https://oomphmedia.com/adwords-begin/#comments Thu, 30 Jan 2014 22:08:32 +0000 jennifer http://www.oomphmedia.com/?p=501

The first thing I think about when beginning a new AdWords campaign is, What is this campaign supposed to accomplish? Besides the obvious to drive sales, there’s also lead gathering and brand awareness.

So why does it matter? Answering the question about your objective will help you to determine what network your ad should appear on. The Display Network acts like a billboard in raising brand awareness. Meanwhile, the Search Network is more like a responsive, well-placed yellow pages ad that elicits a direct response from a consumer.

Your objective also determines how you will be paying for your ads. If you’re looking for brand awareness–for example, you are sponsoring a local play and want to drive people to the play instead of a website–you would most likely want to pay based on how many people actually see your ad. To drive people to your website–where you sell goods or services–you may want to pay every time someone clicks through your ad to your site. The cost-per-acquisition option is what you would use if you wanted to pay each time someone completes an action on your site, such as filling out a petition, or an online form.

AdWords can sometimes be overwhelming. However, asking a few well-thought out questions can make it a lot less daunting.

At Oomph Media, we’re starting a series called “AdWords TOD”, so stay tuned, and be sure add comments below with anything you’d like us to cover in the series. Better yet, hire us to run your ad campaign!