V3 Online

A side effect to the increased number of PPC marketers is the natural tendency for newbies jacking bid prices up thinking it’ll increase their Adwords Quality Score. As many of them soon find out, it’s only costing them money to compete with users with optimized campaigns and Great Quality Scores. Part 1 of this series will cover Adwords Campaign factors which affect your Quality Score, and how to effectively out position your competition including newbies bidding 2-3 times your bid! By developing detailed habits of setting up your Adwords campaigns, you can eventually pump Great Quality Scoring campaigns knowing full well that your ROI will be in the green. PPC marketing can be a very fluid investment, without proper knowledge of camp gain factors, marketers will never come close to achieving anywhere close to their optimal campaign efficiency, let along increasing their Adwords Quality Score.

Quality Score as defined by Google:

“Quality Score is the basis for measuring the quality and relevance of your ads and determining your minimum CPC bid for Google and the search network. This score is determined by your keyword’s click through rate (CTR) on Google, and the relevance of your ad text, keyword, and landing page.”

Now onto the meat of this post!

Factors That Affect Your Campaign:

1) Keyword Relevancy In Your Ad Groups
By grouping your keywords into highly targeted Ad Groups you can effectively lower your CPC as well as increase your Quality Score through increased CTR.

If you have a pre-generated list you can simply fire up the Adwords editor and apply the keyword grouper tool to your list.

If not, when doing your research you can break it down into seed keywords and extension keywords, then you can pair them with a simple PHP script to generate a highly in depth keyword list - sorted by either seeds or extensions for your Ad Group.

Example:
Seeds
blue widgets
light blue widgets
dark blue widgets

Extensions
apply for
applying for
application for
buy
buying

2) Creating Keyword Relevant Ad Copies
It’d be a waste of effort in sorting your keywords into relevant groups if you don’t develop relevant ads. Ads serving keywords in the same group automatically get bolded which can lead to a significant increase in CTR - increasing your Quality Score as well as your ad position.

If you chose to group the above example by extensions your related ad copy could be:

Apply for Widgets Online!
Great offers on Blue Widgets
Find Blue Widget Offers Today!
www.widgets.com/Blue-Widgets

3) Ad Copy Optimization
To further increase your CTR of your newly created ad copy, it’s always create at least 2 or 3 differnt version of your ad. Even adjusting something as little as every word starting with an Upper Case Character could squeeze out an extra 0.01% CTR or two. Some choose to turn off ad serving optimization and then just pick the top performer after a few weeks - then repeat; while others may choose to have it on, it’s something you can play around with.

4) Matching Options
Matching options demonstrate to Google that your keywords are laser targeted and you’re not merely just throwing up the word widget on broad match and letting it pick up anything related to it.

An effective approach to this is to insert all 3 matching options into your adgroups and over time attempting to skew out the broach match (and possibly the phrase match) version of your exact match keywords. For example:

You could be bidding $0.52 on a phrase match term such as “apply for blue widgets” and you’ve realized that this term has received alot of clicks but your [apply for blue widgets] has only a small fraction of clicks.

This is where you can check your analytic logs, or even do it by trial and error for phrases landing on your page. You may be soon presented with a surprise that [blue widgets apply for] is actually searched more and has been producing better results. You could then insert this match and phrase into the same Ad Group and monitor to see if “apply for blue widgets” has changed or not, then repeat if it hasn’t. At the same time you can also lower your exact match bids for this newly found term and match while still retaining good ad position and CTR!

5) Effective Bid Increments
Although this may be a basic strategy for bidding a lot of people fail to apply this simple technique. The majority of users bid in increments of $0.05. A lot of you right now are probably thinking “Okay, so I bid $0.25, $0.30, etc that’s no big secret…”, as a result a lot of your campaigns will have minimal competitive leverage while trying to out position other ad copies.

There isn’t any set way to go about this but by simply starting your bids $0.02 on top of your base price can give you an extra edge while Google calculates your ad position in comparison to your competition. For example:

You and your competitors have similar CTRs and bids are in the same range, by simply starting at $0.27 instead of $0.25 already positions yourself above your competitors by default. As the both of you increase bids by $0.05 you constantly remain higher than him at the MAX cost of an extra $0.02.

This extra edge is only given that the rest of your campaigns are similar - so make sure you’ve properly applied the previous 4 steps to effectively dominate your competition!

*continue to Pt. 2 - Page Factors That Affect Your Quality Score