I would not be the first person to rant and rave about the AdWords quality score. The “feature”, which was designed to penalize landing pages that offered no real content or value to the user, has sent many users pricing skyward as their cost per click (CPC) takes a rather large hit. Many advertisers have even jumped ship, citing that the implementation of Quality Score (QS) in AdWords has made Google’s PPC delivery system ineffective and expensive.
I disagree.
The fact is that AdWords is still the only major PPC engine besides Yahoo! Publishers
Network, and there is boatloads of cash just waiting to be extracted.
Just because your marketing campaigns are costing you more doesn’t mean that you can’t make them profitable. The solution, as always, is simply evolutionary. Just as advertisers had to start making landing pages when Google introduced a series of rules last year, they will once again have to modify their advertising campaigns. In other words, the landing pages need to change.
What Your Landing Pages Need for Good Quality Scores
A few modifications to your landing pages are all you need to keep your pricing low and your conversion ratios high. When the Googlebot crawls your page it’s looking for a few things, such as keyword density and relevant content, and if it doesn’t find them you receive a poor quality score. Landing pages that were little more than an image or two and a “click here” button had none of those things, so take a while guess at what happened?
Landing pages should contain a few things to obtain a good quality score:
- Relevant content that is related to the keyword - If the keyword is “fancy shoes”, you want your landing page to have content that is about fancy shoes. This can be below your graphical offer or splash screen. Most people won’t even bother reading it, but you want to make sure that it’s well written just the same in case someone does.
- Unique URL - Having all of your keywords link to the same URL will hurt your quality score unless they are all directly related. If that were the case, you either have the best content ever written or the keywords are highly focused.Having your URL’s targeted (yoursite.com/keyword, for example) shows Google that each landing page is unique, and having the keyword in the URL increases its relevancy.
- Your ads should also be targeted - Try to mention the keyword in the ad whenever possible, and ensure that the text is related to to the keyword. Google will scan the text and determine whether or not it’s relevant.
Other factors, such as ad position and click-through-ratio (CTR) also play a part in determining your quality score. Unfortunately, you don’t have direct control over those, so your best option is to play around with what you can and see how the effects modify your results.
If you’re still receiving poor quality scores you may want to consider revamping your entire campaign- ad text, landing page, and your maximum CPC. Sometimes all it takes is a fresh look at things.
