In the highly competitive world of AdWords, finding a way to lower the Cost-per-click is a vital and necessary step in competing with competitors and ultimately succeeding in your online advertising efforts. When it comes to lowering your cost per click, Quality Score is very important.
Most advertisers understand Quality Score is important, but why? There are two reasons:
● It lowers your cost per click or cost per action.
● It also improves your ad’s position in the search results page.
In short, it is safe to say that good quality score correlates well with your account success.
This image gives an idea of the relationship between quality score and cost per click. By graphing quality score (1 to 10 on the x-axis) and average cost-per-click (y-axis) you can see a steep decline in average cost-per-click for keywords with a quality score of eight and higher.
Here’s a different graph showing the correlation between a healthy quality score and a healthy click-through rate. The graph shows the weighted average quality score for accounts (keywords/ads) compared to their associated click through rates. It shows us that the higher the quality score, the better the click-through rate.
So how do you improve your Quality Score?
Rather than give you a list of things, let’s look at how we improved the quality score for a real client account, by summarizing the most important account changes in three key tips.
Before we get started, there are many different factors determining your AdWords costs or factors used to determine the Quality Score. However, the factors determining Quality Score are generally categorized by Google into three categories:
● Expected click-through rate
(The likelihood that your ad will be clicked)
● Ad relevance
(How closely your ad matches the intent behind a user’s search)
● Landing page experience
(How relevant, transparent and easy-to-navigate your page is for users)
3 Tips on How to Boost Your Quality Score and Reduce Cost-per-Click
The three most important tips we have listed here all impact the above-mentioned factors and will contribute to improving your Quality Score.
Tip #1 – Use the Right Keywords
Your first step should be to re-evaluate your keywords, or if starting fresh – your keyword choices.
When doing your keyword research and choosing keywords, there are two important things to keep in mind:
● You want to make sure that these keywords are related to your services, products or content, that is already covered on your landing pages.
● You want to make sure you group these keywords in tight themes. This ensures your keywords will be more effectively tied to individual ad campaigns.
The keywords you choose could match a number of different search queries, depending on the match types you use. It’s important to make sure you are not getting impressions for irrelevant search queries. The likelihood of a user clicking on your ad is much lower and if they do click, it’s likely going to be a waste of money because they are not looking for your services or products and likely bounce back immediately.
By choosing the right keywords and making use of negative keywords, the right match types and a substantial number of long-tail keywords, your click-through-rate will soon start improving and that will eventually have a positive impact on your quality score. If you need some help choosing your keywords browse our numerous blog posts on Keyword related topics.
Tip #2 – Make Your Ads More Relevant
Ongoing ad text optimizations are crucial when it comes to improving your Click Through Rate and, in the course of time, your Quality Score.
Now that you have neat and tightly themed ad groups (Tip #1) you want to create highly targeted ads that clearly differentiate your products or services from your competitors. Start by writing at least three or four of them for each ad group.
Tip #3 – Optimize You Landing Pages
Google likes to check your landing pages for expected performance. They refer to this as landing pages user experience.
Here are Google’s four general rules to live by, when it comes to optimizing landing pages:
1. Make sure your landing page matches your ad and keywords.
2. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
3. Make sure your landing page is easy to navigate.
4. Make sure your landing page provides useful and unique content.
Improvements in a Real AdWords Account
By following the above mentioned three tips, we managed to significantly reduce costs. Our client was paying over CHF 100 per conversion, with an average Cost-Per-Click of over CHF 1. Although this particular client is in Real estate, an industry usually associated with high competition and expensive clicks, we managed to reduce the average Cost-per-acquisition down to CHF 20, with an average cost per click of CHF 0.48. This allowed them to acquire more conversions without increasing their budget.
The graph is showing decline in cost/conversion while number of conversions going up.
If you are having trouble improving your Quality Scores or just need a friendly advice, please don’t hesitate to contact us or even drop me a line directly!
