7 tips on how to get more from Google AdWords

Everyone knows that contextual advertising services, such as Google AdWords, are based on auction principles. But in fact, everything is not so simple. Improving your Quality Score means that you will spend less and get more visitors to your site.

Suppose your Google AdWords budget is $ 50,000 per year. You are competing with much larger companies that have advertising budgets much higher than yours. Often this means that they can buy a lot more keywords from those that you need than you.
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But it's not always the case.

Bidding on keywords are not entirely according to the principles of a regular auction. Google assigns a quality indicator to each ad - a number from 1 to 10, which, according to the search giant, reflects whether the ad will appeal to the site to which it leads visitors or not. This number affects the rank of your ad in the auction. A high quality score will allow you to outrun your competitors with higher rates and get more from each of your advertising dollars. Doubling the quality score means you pay half the cost per click.

Here are some tips on how to improve your quality score:

1. Do not show ads that will not click

No need to act on the principle "we will hang this announcement here and see if someone will go over it." This may seem logical, but it is often a mistake. The click-to-impression ratio (CTR) is one of the most important components of the quality score, so if your ad is shown but users don’t click on it, the quality score drops dramatically, and the cost of rerunning the same ad and even others will increase in the future . Google assigns quality scores to ad groups and advertisers themselves, so a bad CTR can hurt you in many cases. Therefore, it is worth constantly testing key phrases in different formulations in order to find combinations with the highest CTR. This will not only bring you more customers, but also lower the cost per click.

2. Divide and swim

You can use thousands of keywords in the same ad group that lead to the same page. But it turns out that the result is much better if you divide them into groups of several words in each, connected by a common meaning, and which will lead to the corresponding pages. For example, if you sell accessories for cameras, you do not need to put “Nikon”, “Canon”, “point and shoot”, “SLR” into one ad group. They are worth breaking. For example, to create an ad group in which only batteries for Canon PowerShot are advertised and clicking on which would lead to the page with these batteries. And so on. Such behavior may be the trump card of a small company against major competitors.

3. Get rid of keywords that don't work.

Instead of a long list of key phrases that characterize all your sentences. Some of them may turn out to be more popular due to the fact that they characterize general concepts, but the advertising campaign will be blurred and some of the customers who were looking for one thing and got another will go away disappointed. The best keywords will be those that are not generic. Choose the words and phrases that will be most private in the niche that you represent.

4. There should be normal content on the landing page and on the whole site.

Having useful information is one of the most important things that improves your quality score. Do not use the contents of other sites. You will need unique, diverse, frequently updated content. This leads to a better user response. Make it so that users can trust you and your site, people are looking for exactly that.

5. Give users a choice

You can try on your landing pages to encourage users to take specific actions. For example, “click here to learn about our products” or “sign up for our free newsletter”. But Google wants users to have a wide range of options and navigation menus on your landing page can improve your quality scores.
After the user has arrived at the landing page, he wants more information. So give it to her. Make sure they want to explore your site. Otherwise, they will be disappointed, which will have a negative effect on the quality indicator.

6. Tell us about yourself

If your site does not have well-visible links to the “about us” or “about the company” section, there is no data or a section on the rules for using personal data that you ask the user, such as an email address, your quality score will suffer. Google is interested in advertisers' transparency. And if users have to trust their data, the company wants to be sure that they will be used for their intended purpose and will not be in the hands of spammers.

7. Make your pages load faster.

Make sure your pages load quickly. If they do it too slowly, users will not like it. Change the hosting or reduce the number or size of images and interactive elements on the page to achieve an acceptable download speed.
Often this indicator is very critical. Even minor downtime can be noticed by Google’s automatic quality check. Obviously, faced with the fact that the landing page is not available, the program will reduce the quality score. Constantly follow these indicators of your site.

via Inc.