Receive new blog posts immediately direct to your email inbox!
The ROI Revolution Blog
« New GA Feature: Annotations | Main | Happy Holidays from ROI Revolution! »
5 Step Google Initial Quality Score Checklist
December 16, 2009
You don't get a second chance to make a good first impression. The moment you upload your new campaigns & ad groups, even if paused, Google gives you an initial quality score. If it's below average you'll be paying more per click until Google has enough data for your actual performance to determine your quality score.If you don't come out of the gate with your best foot forward, you'll pay a premium on your first 100+ clicks. Worse, you may be tempted to give up on a keyword prematurely based on astronomical bid prices. Pay attention to the checklist below when launching new campaigns, ad groups or keywords into your AdWords account.
The good news is that all these suggestions won't just help your initial quality score, but should actually increase the long-term quality of your AdWords campaigns.
Here's how to get the best possible initial quality scores in Google:
1. Use AdWords Editor instead of the web interface when creating new campaigns
You can't "undo" a first impression, so you'll want to create and optimize your new campaign in an offline editor. This will allow you to reorganize keywords and ad groups before Google can give you an initial quality score.
2. Don't launch campaigns as paused until the landing page is ready
It can be tempting to one-up your web developer by launching built-out campaigns as paused while waiting for the landing page to be completed. Don't do it. Have patience... create a backup, write new ads, go on a long lunch, but don't launch your campaigns into Google until everything is optimized.
3. Create as many ad groups as necessary to use all high-traffic keywords in your ads
Your quality score matters the most for keywords that get the most traffic. A big part of quality score is whether your ads are relevant to the keywords. In the beginning, the relevancy question is simply, "Are the keywords in the ads?" You may need to make additional ad groups for high traffic keywords to make sure those keywords are included in your ads.
4. Make sure your landing page is relevant for your keywords
Here's the quick test: put your landing page URL into Google's keyword tool. Do your keywords come up in the keyword ideas list? If not, edit your content so they show up. Ideally you'd have a unique landing page for every ad group. At the very least, you'll probably want a landing page for each campaign.
5. Make sure your landing page has good navigation and generally isn't "spammy."
This is the least straightforward. Google doesn't like spammy pages and will give you perpetually poor quality scores if your site looks spammy. They don't let on to their secret algorithms to gauge the spammyness of a site, but if your site functions more like a snake oil infomercial than Wikipedia, you may have some work cut out for you.
We've recorded a few more AdWords strategies and posted a six-minute video to help you get better results with your online advertising.
Posted by Chris Crompton, PPC Specialist at 1:05 PM
Permalink | Comments ( 5 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )
Filed under: Online Advertising
Comments
One thing that I always do when I am launching a new campaign is to run brand ads alone for a couple of weeks. Brand ads always have the highest CTR and quality score so by christening the account with these campaigns any subsequent campaigns will benefit.
In regards to point 5, I was privy to a recent presentation about QS at Google HQ. Their explanation on landing pages and QS was that the landing page was either spammy or not and was therefore either accepted or not. Other than this yes and no acceptance of the landing page it had no other effect on QS.
December 17, 2009 4:55 PM
said:@Derek: Good input on the landing page quality being either good or bad. I guess all the more reason to make sure the landing page isn't spammy since this is a tough label to overcome.
December 18, 2009 9:23 AM
Great post Chris!
Your so right about the landing page relevancy.. and the keyword tool trick that helps you determine a lot about your site.
Remember to have a privacy policy, about us, contact us, disclaimer, and a sitemap.. That will help out the quality score big time.
Look forward to more great content here Chris!
Jason
December 18, 2009 5:34 PM
Chris,
Thanks for this great post. I recently used it as a checklist on a couple of PPC optimization project and it was great to have the process boiled down so succinctly. Number 3 is an important point that so many people don't get, but Adwords Editor does a beautiful job of helping to break Ad Groups down correctly.
Thanks again,
Deb
#1 is essential. Having beta tested the tool (had version 0.3 or something close) I can say it has made account management so much easier. I ALWAYS use the tool when setting up an account and making changes. The drag and drop features really help in organizing an account effectively.
December 16, 2009 2:52 PM