A common pitfall I often see when checking out customers PPC campaigns is that they load their groups and campaigns with hundreds, if not thousands, of keywords served by only a handful of ads. The problem with this is there is no way a thousand keywords could be relevant to a handful of ads.
For example, if my keyword is “SEO Consultant Toronto”, I want to make sure the ad that is churned out is going to be relevant. I don’t want one of my Guelph ads popping up. The best solution for this is to have as many Google adgroups as possible. For example, I’ll have an adgroup called “Toronto SEO” and a separate adgroup called “Guelph SEO”.
I’ll load the Toronto SEO group up with hundreds of keywords that relate to this topic. I’ll make sure each ad has the words SEO and Toronto in it. I’ll apply this logic to the Guelph group too.
I’ll then load each Google adgroup up with as many different combinations of ads (but still relevant) as possible. It’s almost like getting them to compete against each other. I’ll set the option in adwords to rotate evenly. After a week I now have solid data of what’s performing and what’s not. If an ad has been displayed 1000 times but only been clicked a few times (low CTR) then I’ll delete it and replace it with something totally new, if not a little crazy. The ad that has performed the best then stays on and the losers are eliminated.
The trick is to stay well organised. If a keyword is important to you then treat it that way. No more clunking a hundred keywords together and expecting great results. I find that If I have too many keywords that aren’t closely tied in relevancy then my keyword quality score is going to suffer.
The beauty with Google adwords is that you can type in a keyword and see your quality score straight away. If your quality score is no good, delete it, make some alterations to the landing page and type it in again.
Tips for Adwords PPC Quality Score
Rename images accordingly. If the keyword you’re going after is “black shoes” then make sure all images are named “black-shoes.jpg”, or “black running shoes.jpg” etc. Add an alt image tag while you’re there. Eg. alt image=”picture of black running shoes”.
Check your URLs, Title, and heading tags because I’m always shocked at how often these are ignored.
What is the quality of your landing page? Are people bouncing? Do you have duplicate content? Have you got something of interest to sell/say? That’s the common misconception of adwords, there is a belief that the person that bids the most, ranks higher, and gets the most clicks. This is not the case, because if I bid $3.00 for a keyword, and a competitor bids $20 for a keyword, it doesn’t mean anything if his site continually produces bounces, and is seen as low quality. Google wants the user to have a good experience and come back so there is no way they are going to risk showing bad content (no matter how much you pay) and risk the user going to a rival search engine as a result.
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