Category: PPC (Google AdWords)

If you’re looking to improve an ad’s position, looking at your website’s user experience (UX) is a sensible place to start. As something that’s known to affect Ad Rank, Quality Score, and even the amount you’re spending on ads, it’s an important factor in AdWords success.

How high your ad is positioned in search engine results often depends on how much you’re prepared to spend, so if you want to boost search engine results but keep your AdWords budget as it is – looking at your Quality Score is the way forward!

There are a number of things that increase Quality Score, but for this post we’re going to concentrate on just UX.

Why User Experience Matters

UX matters for a number of reasons relating to growing your business and building a loyal customer base. In terms of AdWords, Google itself has cited user experience as one of the ways to improve Quality Score – even very kindly giving you advice on improving your landing page’s UX, so you don’t even have to guess!

So let’s have a look at what Google considers important:

1. Content that’s relevant, useful, and original

Everything on your ad’s landing page should be both relevant to your ad and engaging to visitors. Look at the keywords and text in your ad and make sure that when users click through, they’re taken to a page they actually find useful. If they’ve searched for a particular kitchen gadget, landed on your ad thanks to the keywords you’ve used, and are taken to a general homewares page – they’re going to be frustrated and click away.

2. A trustworthy and transparent website

Make information about your business and how to contact you easy for visitors to find, and be open about what your products and services are rather than expecting them to work for it. If you’re going to ask for personal info, make sure you explain exactly what you’ll do with it and how you’ll keep it private. Transparency and trustworthiness should be something every business strives for, and the fact it helps your conversion rate is a bonus!

3. Easy to navigate

Once your visitor has landed somewhere relevant and useful from your ad, how easy is it to navigate around? They shouldn’t have to search high and low for the information they’re looking for, and that applies to both computer and mobile users. If there’s anything relevant to their purchase (shipping or returns, for example), make sure it’s somewhere on the page. Another issue is annoying pop-ups or anything else that can interfere with visitors’ ability to navigate and therefore worsen their UX.

4. Fast loading times

Making sure your landing page, and your website in general, loads quickly can stop visitors getting bored of waiting and navigating away after they click on your ad. An easy to navigate site with fast page speeds makes both Google and potential customers happy, and gets you more conversions.

5. Mobile responsiveness

Making your website mobile responsive is imperative as more and more people are using mobile to access the internet. Adwords actually assign a different quality score for the same keyword on mobile devices which allows you the opportunity to re-write your ads and make the website mobile responsive for mobile.

Before you even think about paying for a Google AdWords campaign you should be making sure any visitors it attracts will have a great experience once they get to your website. Following these tips will help you do just that, and don’t forget that there are other aspects to getting the best Quality Score possible.

You probably already know how important your Google AdWords Quality Score is, because the higher your ad is scored, the more relevant your ad and landing page is to a search query. A good Quality Score means a higher CTR (click-through-rate) – and this is the aim of the game when it comes to any PPC (pay-per-click) campaign.

Knowing your Quality Score needs to be higher is all well and good, but how do you actually go about increasing it? There are certain factors that affect an ad’s Quality Score, and certain steps you can take to improve those factors.

Before we get onto the good stuff though, it’s important to know exactly where your Quality Score lives. The screenshot below is from a client’s AdWords account. In order to view an ads quality score, you need to select the ‘Keyword’ tab. If the Quality Score column is not already visible, you will need to select the ‘Columns’ dropdown menu and then select ‘Modify columns…’

Here are 5 ways you can Increase Quality Score in Google AdWords

1. Use long-tail keywords

Long-tail keywords are a really effective way of increasing your Quality Score. They’re highly specific and therefore better for pre-qualifying your traffic, higher converting, and less competitive – which all added together helps you boost your ad relevance and therefore your Quality Score!

2. Work on your click-through rate

A huge part of the Quality Score is based on Google’s algorithm that forecasts your ad’s click-through rate (CTR), so you should be doing what you can to optimise your average CTR. The higher your expected CTR is, the higher your Quality Score will be. Google wants to know that its users are satisfied with the ad results they see when they search, and CTR is the perfect metric to measure that. So with any ad you run, consider everything that’s going to increase your CTR, including a compelling headline and the URL of your landing page (does the URL itself have your keywords in, for example?).

3. Ensure your ads are highly targeted

Another of the ways you can improve that CTR is through the text of your ads themselves, making sure they’re fully optimized and highly targeted. Look at things like producing high-quality, targeted copy that reads professionally, split testing your copy to make sure it’s as tight as possible, and writing more ads (while keeping the quality) to prove you’re the solution to the audience you’re targeting.

4. Study best practices…

…and make sure you stick to them! Best practices are ‘best’ for a reason, so keep up-to-date with what you should (or shouldn’t!) be doing. Examples could relate to PPC marketing (like geo-targeting), landing page optimization (like making the page responsive across all devices), or anything else that is relevant to Quality Score.

5. Make PPC work a priority!

It’s no good following these tips if you’re not putting the work into your PPC ads the rest of the time, because you need to be active if you’re looking for AdWords success. If you’re not working consistently to improve and optimise your account, any work you do in trying to improve your Quality Score will just be firefighting rather than proactively boosting your chances of a good score.

A high AdWords Quality Score means you’ll pay less for traffic, create good traction early on in your campaigns, and ultimately expand the areas your traffic comes from, so doing what you can increase that score is essential for your success!