^^^ 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!