It’s already 4 in the morning and you’re still on your puter…
You just pulled an all-nighter tweaking your ad copy and landing pages.
Having already downed your 5th caffeine bomb, you’re “riding the black dragon” at this point.
You refresh the page for the nth time.
When your Quality Score appeared on the screen, it’s as if a “wrong answer buzzer sound” blasted out your bitter results:
6 out of 10.
(Womp womp woommppp.)
“Whhhyyyyyyyy??!!!!”
You see red.
Something inside you snaps, and you find yourself hurling your computer against the nearest wall.
Now I’m not saying I’ve done this exactly, but I’ve been obsessing over optimising Quality Scores since 2013 and, having audited 300+ Google Ads, I know how mojo-crushing this can get.
So if you’ve been running your Google Ads and you want the smartest ways to increase the profitability of your campaigns…
Then this definitive Google Ads guide is for you.
10/10 Quality Score of the Google Ads that we ran for our client, Pristine Home.
But first, let’s clarify one thing…
What is Quality Score — Really?
The way Google profits is in two ways:
- By ensuring that the end-users get the best possible experience I.e. relevant results
- By serving up relevant ads with the highest click-through rate i.e. so they profit from the clicks.
Translation: giving users exactly what they’re looking for, at the time they’re looking for them.
This is why Google ensures that the advertisers who are serving the most relevant and useful ads are rewarded.
Therefore, having a tool that indicates how well your ads are meeting the users’ needs can help you optimise your campaigns.
Quality Score (QS) is such a diagnostic tool.
Measured on a scale from 1 to 10, the higher your QS, the better it is.
Every keyword in your Google Ads account is assigned a QS (you get it after you reach a certain threshold of clicks and impressions).
A QS of 5 or below is low, 6 to 7 is acceptable, whereas 8 to 10 is smashing.
Why is Quality Score Important?
The higher your QS, the lower your cost per click (CPC), which means the lower your cost per conversion.
- The higher your QS, the more often your ads will be displayed (and in higher positions).
- The higher your QS, the higher your chances of getting a better click-through rate (CTR).
With a higher QS, you can get more impressions, more clicks and more conversions without having to raise your bids!
The Big 3 Factors That Impact Quality Score:
To improve your QS, you must improve the components that directly affect it:
- Expected click-through rate (CTR) – the likelihood of your ad getting clicked when shown.
- Ad relevance – how closely your ad matches the user’s intent when they perform the search.
- Landing page experience – how relevant and useful your landing page is to the people who click your ad.
Google grades each of these components as ‘Above average’, ‘Average’ or ‘Below average’.
(This depends on comparative data gathered from the other advertisers whose ads were also shown for the exact same keyword over the last 90 days.)
Now let’s tackle concrete actionables you could apply to optimise those three factors!
How To Improve Your CTR Like A Pro:
Optimise Your Ad Copy
Ensure that everything in your ad copy matches your target user’s intent.
Suppose you search for “luxury property management services London”.
Which of these two ads would you click?
Well, it depends on who you are and what you are after.
If you have commercial, multi-unit luxury properties you’ll find the first ad more aligned with your intent. Whereas if you have a multi-million-pound mansion you need looking after, the second ad seems to be more appropriate.
See the difference?
Identify who you’re targeting and align your copy to meet their specific criteria.
Make your offer more compelling by appealing to their desires and fears.
You can only write benefit-driven copy if you tap into your target audience’s top pain points and buying motivations. So don’t guess – make sure you find out what they really are.
Use “gutsy” copy.
It’s not about getting clicks, it’s about getting the right kind. So don’t be afraid to use copy that repels those you don’t want to attract in the first place.
For example, if you’re selling luxury mattresses, copy like “free pillows and bedding sets” may attract those who are budget-driven. In other words, NOT the type of people who are likely to buy mattresses fit for royalty.
Whereas copy like “finest craftsmanship using sustainable materials”, “custom Swedish design”, “designed to last 45+ years”, “mattress provider to 12 royal families for countless generations” may engage people who are willing to pay top dollar for top quality.
Use specificity to help emphasise important aspects of your unique value propositions; highlight discounts or time-limited offers to help drive urgency.
Compare this ad to the one after it:
Now compare it to this one:
Notice how the second ad uses more specificity and multi-faceted value propositions like being regulated, having certifications and an extensive portfolio, etc.
Use Calls to Action that describe a concrete pay-off they’ll get if they click.
For example:
- “Get Your Free 60-Day Trial Now”
- “Get Started”
- “Set Up In 2 Minutes”
- “Create Your Free Account” (No credit card required)
- “Join free for a month”
Leverage Google Ad Extensions to Increase CTR
Ad Extensions are elements you can add to your text ad.
The more of them you use, the more space your ad occupies (and the more noticeable they appear) on the SERPs.
You also give users more nuanced options to find the specific information they seek.
Look at the screenshot below and notice how the first ad grabs your attention more.
Notice how the additional links (Probate & Inheritance, Contact Now, FAQ, etc) within the first ad gives users the choice to click through to a specific part of your website. These are called Sitelink extensions and it’s just one of many Ad Extensions you have at your disposal.
And that’s the best thing about Ad extensions: they give your prospects the chance to click on what’s most relevant to their goal at that moment. You can even schedule the days and times that specific ad extensions show in your ads.
Types of Ad Extensions:
Executed properly, Ad extensions can boost your CTR, help improve your ad rank, increase post-click landing page views, and reduce your average cost per click.
So take full advantage of them as much as you can:
Location extensions adds a hyperlinked and clickable location of your business.
App extensions showcase your mobile or tablet app by showing a link to your app below your ad. This is only beneficial if your business uses a mobile app.
Structured Snippets let you highlight specific aspects of your offer. For example, an ad for a dental clinic might use “Treatments: Cosmetic dentistry, Endodontic procedures, Pediatric, Periodontal, Orthodontic services.”
Call extensions let you include a phone number in your ad. Google lets you track those call conversions too so make sure you set up its tracking.
Message extensions are great for customers who prefer to send messages instead of calling.
Callout extensions let you add copy to highlight particular features, services or benefits.
Price extensions let you display individual offers (along with their pricing) and link them directly to the relevant page on your site. They display as a set of up to 8″ cards that searches can peruse to see different options.
Image courtesy of Search Engine Journal
Promotion extensions let you showcase your promos for searchers hunting for the best deals.
Automated Ad Extensions
Google adds automated ad extensions when it predicts doing so will boost your campaign’s performance. Because they’re automatic, you don’t have to set them up. Examples of these are:
- Dynamic sitelink extensions
- Automated call & message extensions
- Dynamic structured snippet extensions
- Seller Ratings extensions (they only appear if your business has a minimum of 150 unique reviews and an average of “3.5 stars” rating or higher)
- Dynamic callout extensions
While it makes sense to use Ad Extensions as much as possible, I advise being relentless when it comes to testing to see which ones actually work well for you.
Build & Refine Your Negative Keyword Lists
Because you’re paying per click, only bid on keywords that will produce conversions.
It’s only worth paying for the right kind of traffic.
A great way to do this is to identify the Negative Keywords.
These are keywords you DON’T want to trigger your ads because they’re used by people whom you don’t want to see your ads.
Notice the disconnect between the ad and the intent behind the search query.
If you don’t declare useless and irrelevant keywords, then your ads will be triggered by those searches (just like in the screenshot above).
By now you know that if you’re spending on irrelevant keywords then your quality score is going down. We don’t want that.
Having audited over 300 Adwords accounts (I’ve been doing this since 2013), I would say that about 80% of Ad Spend is being wasted.
That’s just a rough estimate from what I have personally seen, but other experienced advertisers corroborate my findings.
According to Disruptive Advertising, based on the Adwords Accounts, they have audited, the average ad account wastes 76% of their ad spend on the wrong or non-converting search terms.
Source: Disruptive Advertising
(By the way, if you’re wasting even just a fraction of your ad spend, you want to set things up so that at least YOU FIND OUT when it happens. After all, the higher your wasted ad spend, the higher your cost per conversion. This is another reason why setting up the right conversion tracking in place is essential!)
The more money you waste on the wrong search terms, the less moolah you can put towards the right ones and the more irrelevant your ads will be.
The result: fewer clicks, bad quality leads, low QS, wasted ad spend, higher cost per conversion, and you don’t look as pretty (from all the hair-pulling and constant frowning, I mean).
Here are my top tips for creating a powerful Negative Keywords list:
Use all-time search history
Remember all those things I said earlier about wasted ad spend? Well, you’ll be glad to know that you can make your prior wasted ad spend set you up for success!
How?
By using all that data to find a huge amount of negative keywords.
All you need to do is review your “all-time search term history”.
You can identify negative keywords while also identifying positive keywords. Mark the negative keywords in red so you know to turn those into a negative list for your campaigns.
Because Google runs your ads on relevant variations of your keywords (including synonyms, possible misspellings, stemming, and other related searches), broad match keywords can serve on searches that don’t contain the keyword from the keyword list, as well as searches that are related to the keyword but don’t mean the same thing.
Misspelled keywords waste a lot of ad spend
Use Google predictive search
My second tip is by using Google predictive search or recommended searches (at the bottom of Google) as well as reviewing the first couple of pages of results.
We’ve found that people searching for a specific name of a person don’t convert so we have a large names list that we use.
You can often find things like brand names and first names to immediately add in as negative keywords.
For example, say you’re only stocking Cartier, Bulgari and Rolex but not Omega and Chopard, so you may decide to exclude those brand searches.
If you’re selling top-tier luxury watches only multi-millionaires can afford, your ads may still show up for queries like “top luxury watches under $250” or “affordable luxury watches”.
Those searches aren’t likely to convert because they’re not looking to buy the types you sell.
Complete an N-Gram Analysis
My third tip involves using a somewhat technical technique called an N-Gram Analysis.
Tools like PPC Samurai and Adalysis can do N-grams.
N-gram allows you to review ad accounts and break down every search term into a single word (or search phrase) and then do lookups to see how many searches have used that word (or phrase) and what’s the CTR, cost per click, conversion rate, the CPA, etc so you can see their impact.
Many advertisers are far too specific with their negative keywords i.e. you’ll block [affordable luxury accommodation in palm cove] rather than just blocking the word “affordable”. By blocking single or double words you become far more proactive in terms of tuning your account.
A detailed breakdown of how it’s done is beyond the scope of this article, but basically doing an N-Gram analysis will allow you to identify the specific words and phrases that demonstrate the strongest correlation (either positively or negatively) with ad performance for any given campaign.
From there, we can:
- Discover our most profitable keyword combos and then find additional ways to leverage them further.
- Optimise our ad spend even more by identifying what’s causing the highest amounts of wasted ad spend and then adding them to our negative keywords list.
Using N-grams, you’ll get data-backed answers to questions like:
- “Which individual words do our target prospects use the most?”
- “Which topics are driving the most conversions?”
- “Are there specific locations where we are considering converting more visitors from?”
- “Is there a difference between how users search for the info they need VS the language we use in our own messaging?”
- “Where can we increase our ad spend on, and be confident that we’ll enjoy high-ROI?”
The bigger the account, and the higher the volume of searches, the more challenging it can be to pick out potential negative words that could be chewing your money across an entire account.
Using N-grams lets machine power do the hard lifting for you and identify actionable nuances that would be impossible to see otherwise.
Leverage Dynamic Search Ads
Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) are ads that appear based on your site’s content (as opposed to relying on keywords).
Basically, Google crawls your site and pulls content. After gathering and analysing your website’s most relevant keywords, it then matches your site to relevant search terms. Then Google dynamically generates the headline, display URL, final URL and landing pages to match the search term.
Since you won’t be bidding on keywords, you just need to write versatile descriptions for your DSAs. You also get to specify (from a variety of targeting options) which pages DSAs should be used as landing pages.
For example:
Say you own a chain of boutique hotels in Australia. Someone searching for “luxury hotel Melbourne” sees your (dynamic) ad with the headline “Luxury hotel – Melbourne,” clicks your ad, and then ends up on the dedicated landing page of your site listing your Melbourne locations.
Dynamic search ads look the same as text ads but the URL and headline are generated dynamically.
You can create rules for Google that determine which pages are used to create dynamic ads.
Executed properly, DSAs can bring you more exposure and thus drive more volume to your site.
They can also be cheaper to target, hyper-relevant and save you time. Can you imagine creating ad groups for 10,000 products in your eCommerce store? That’ll be loco!
But with DSAs, you can create them in minutes versus hours or weeks!
But because DSAs function based on your site’s actual content, and because Google is automatically creating and triggering them, then you have less control over them.
They’re not suitable for certain types of websites. If your site contains a lot of Flash content (do people still use this?), or if your content changes daily, or if any of your pages have restricted access, then DSAs won’t work for you.
How to Set Up Dynamic Search Ads
You can create a new campaign or do it within an existing campaign.
Create a new ad group and select the ad group type to “dynamic”.
Give it a name and then select “specific web pages” if you want to create a rule or use “all website pages” if you want to start with everything.
Here Are My Top DSA Tips:
- Because Google uses your website page titles to generate your ad’s headline, ensure you have well-written page titles and site content. Follow Google’s editorial policy rules and limit your titles and headlines to 90 characters max to make them more “DSA-friendly”. If Google doesn’t nail the “scent” of your landing page then it can target more obscure and irrelevant terms.
- Improve the content and accessibility of your pages (or your entire website) first before launching your ads. Here’s a comprehensive guide on how to optimise your landing pages.
- One of the downsides of DSAs is that some low-performing search queries can eat up your budget before the better-performing ones are searched on. This is why having the right structure and constantly updating your Negative Keywords List are super important. You generally want to lower your CPC with DSAs in the short term until you’re confident they’re targeting quality traffic. When you give control to Google, you want to constantly check to ensure you’re targeting relevant terms.
- Set up dedicated landing pages for dedicated traffic and target those specific pages for your DSAs. To do so, go to Advanced Settings and select “Target Specific Web Pages”, and then enter the URLs of your dedicated landing pages. You might want to use dedicated Service Pages, Product Pages, and Pricing Pages.
How To Improve Ad Relevance Without Spending Hours:
If your Ad Relevance is graded as ‘Average’ or ‘Below Average’, follow my next 3 time-saving hacks:
Structure Your Campaigns Optimally
There are a few ways I structure Ad Campaigns for optimal performance.
Let me share two ways here:
- Keyword Clustering
- Using your website structure
Ad Campaign Structure Using Keyword Clustering
Keyword Clustering is when you group keywords into themes. These themes can be based on your products, services or categories that match how your users think about what you offer.
To truly appreciate the value of Keyword Clustering, I need to first explain Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGs).
SKAGs used to be a great technique to have a great degree of control over your ad campaigns’ relevancy.
(SKAGs = we put a single keyword in a single ad group and then created a perfect match between keyword, ad copy and landing page).
But, for some time now Google has been making changes to our keyword targeting by allowing something called close variants. Let me explain.
In the past when you targeted an exact keyword, it was exactly that.
If you targeted “nappy bags” as an exact match then you wouldn’t target anything else.
Now, with the introduction of close variants, with the exact same targeting you’ll also be targeting “baby bags”, “diaper bags”, “nappy bag backpack” and much more.
You might think this is fair but this example highlights it targeting topic clusters where it can also go completely off the broken path.
When it happened, obviously PPC advertisers took to the streets with their pitchforks and a riot ensued.
I exaggerate, but only a lil bit.
This change made it practically impossible to optimise your ad copy for a single keyword because that keyword is susceptible to matching a wide range of queries.
This “loosening of keyword match types” limited advertisers’ ability to optimise their ads according to different types of queries.
Even though this meant more exposure, advertisers got less control over which queries trigger their ads.
Besides, these impressions and clicks aren’t necessarily great because many of them are from users whose queries are irrelevant to your business.
It also included things like spelling mistakes, typos and other issues that more often produced traffic that simply didn’t convert.
So, now that an “exact match” keyword is no longer an exact match, SKAGs still make sense to a degree but for the reasons I just outlined above, I now do a technique called keyword clustering.
You see, because Google created a lot of keyword overlap, even if you’re using an exact match for, say, “home cleaner”, if someone searches for “home cleaning services” or “home cleaner sydney” your ad could still fire.
So that’s how SKAGs became tricky. If you have a single keyword in a single ad group and then you create another 100 different ad groups you’re going to create a whole lot of overlap.
That overlap can make it more challenging to see which keywords are performing and which are causing wasted ad spend. It becomes challenging to see whether it’s a landing page issue, a campaign issue or something else altogether.
Eliminating some of that overlap is how Keyword Clustering helps.
For example:
For one of our clients (a florist), we created campaigns for general terms (e.g flowers online), a shopping campaign and we also made some suburb related campaigns (e.g flower delivery Bondi).
If you click into a suburb campaign you’ll see ad groups, and each ad group is a single suburb (e.g., Brunswick, Northcote, Richmond, etc)
If you click into Brunswick you’ll see how we’re not just using a single keyword; instead, we are using variations of themed keywords (“florist Brunswick”, “flower delivery Brunswick”, “send flowers Brunswick”, etc.):
We structure campaigns into clusters of relevant search terms.
Notice how we’re not doing an ad group around a single keyword. We’re not putting “florists Brunswick” into a single ad group and then “flower delivery” in another ad group because it’s not going to work as well. It’s going to create overlap.
Another way to structure ads is by basing them on your website.
Structure Your Ads Using Your Website Categories
Suppose you have a plumbing site. You’ll have search queries like “plumbers”, “plumbers near me” etc. These are what I call “general terms”.
Then you have searches using more specific terms like “blocked drain plumber”, “taps plumber”, “toilet plumber” etc.
(By the way, you should have a Service Page for each of your services if you want to perform well for SEO too.)
If you create a Keyword Cluster ad group around the term “blocked drain plumber”, or “blocked pipe plumber” etc and send traffic to their corresponding landing pages then you’ll create “perfect matches” (which I’ll explain in a minute).
Here’s another example…
When we set up the ads for our then client Pest Ex, we used their website to structure our ad campaigns.
On their website, they have “Termites” and under it, they’ve got “Termite Treatment Costs”, “Termite Inspections”, etc.
If this is your website, you could create an ad group for each of these:
- “Termite treatment cost” (and price related keywords)
- “Termite inspections”
- “Termite barriers”
- “Termite treatment”
Another one is “Pest Control”:
You could put “Pest Control” in its own campaign. You could do an ad group for each of the pages under it:
“Pest Control Gold Coast”
“Pest Control Brisbane”
“Pest Control Logan”, etc…
And then send traffic to those specific web pages.
So you see that we’re no longer looking at keyword level — we’re looking at clusters of keywords that we can target and send to specific areas of your site.
Aim For a “Perfect Match” to Boost Your Ad Relevance
When a user searches for “award-winning sustainable residential architects in Sydney” (for example), and your ad’s headline, subheadline, description (and even the URL) contain those words… and your landing page components (headline, subheadline, hero image, etc) also reflect those words, then it’s what I call a perfect match.
Perfect matching your ad components helps establish relevance not only in Google’s eyes but also in the minds of those seeing your ads. Look at the screenshot below and notice the search term I used and the ads that I got served with:
As you can see, the first ad didn’t mention “award-winning” or “sustainable”.
{“Perfect match” is when your ad’s headline, subheadline and description, as well as your landing page copy (and other components in your landing page like the meta description), match the search term.}
It sounds simple in theory, but if you are targeting hundreds (or thousands) of search terms, creating a perfect match means you need to create hundreds or thousands of dedicated landing pages as well. That is, each search term equals creating a landing page dedicated to that search term.
You can easily imagine the number of man-hours you’d need building these perfectly matched campaigns!
And if you already have hundreds or thousands of different landing pages and you’re still updating text on every single page, you already know what a time-suck this is.
Later on, when we get to my tips on how to improve your users’ Landing Page experience, I will tell you about how we built a WordPress Plugin as a solution to this problem — stay tuned.
By using this plugin, you only need to spend time building one to just a handful of landing pages… and then leverage those to build hundreds and thousands of perfectly matched landing pages!
And because we made it out of necessity, we designed it exactly to solve the problems we face as PPC profitability optimisers.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. More on that later.
Maximise Responsive Search Ads (RSAs)
Ever wondered which combinations of headlines, descriptions and CTAs perform best in terms of the KPIs you’re optimising for?
Of course, you have.
You and just about every serious advertiser, even way before the interwebs existed.
Well, imagine being able to provide multiple ad headlines and descriptions to a magical genie… And then whenever your ideal prospects do a search, this genie shows them the ad combination that’s most likely to perform.
And the more data it gathers over time, the better it gets.
Well, that’s pretty much what Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) are.
The more ad copy variations you provide, the more combos Google can generate (you can provide up to 15 Headlines and 4 descriptions). Google generates these ad variations into Expanded Text Ads and then displays the most relevant to the user’s intent and needs.
It’s as if the Google Genie smiled upon us advertising aladdins and granted our wish, hey!
By leveraging RSAs, you can…
- Spend less time writing and testing ad copy.
- Automate the process of boosting your Ad Relevance and your CTR.
- Reach more of your ideal prospects.
- Potentially enjoy higher conversion rates.
Here are my best tips for maximising RSAs:
Have two Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) and one RSA per Ad Group.
There’s a limit of 3 enabled RSAs per ad group. Having both ad types in an ad group can let you leverage the strengths of each. That way, they “cover all the bases” and thus give better performance.
You can use RSAs to glean rapid insights for most commonly served headlines, and then move those headlines to ETAs.
Fill in all 15 headlines and all 4 description fields. Make each of them unique.
Your goal is to empower Google to produce every powerful permutation from mixing and matching the components you provide. To get the maximum results, make each headline and description emphasise something different. Don’t be repetitive.
Use keyword-rich headlines.
Remember that we’re aiming for a “perfect match”!
Use the “Ad Strength” tool to optimise your RSAs
Ad Strength measures the relevance, quality, and diversity of your ad copy. Use their actionable feedback to provide the right messages to your customers and improve the effectiveness of your ads.
Be strategic with the “pin” function.
Headlines and descriptions can appear in any order but you can “pin” a headline or description in specified positions.
For example, if you’re targeting “home cleaning services” or your brand name, you might decide to pin it in headline 1, and then have your core and secondary benefits pinned in positions 2 and 3.
This can help with raising the quality score and CTR because you’re creating an exact match between what people are searching for and what people are clicking on.
Use the Dynamic Keyword Insertion Variable
This variable is part of the default Google Ads functionality called a Value Track parameter. Using the {keyword} syntax, it lets you insert the keyword that triggers your ad.
(You can also use the Convertaholic WordPress plugin to leverage this functionality by making Google send the contents of this variable through to your landing page via the URL and then our plugin embeds it onto your pages. I explain the plugin in more detail in tip #10)
You can also tell Google to insert the search keyword using the following syntax. If the word cannot fit then it will use the default of “home cleaning services”.
I prefer to have tighter ad groups and only have certain keywords and searches to fire within different ad groups. This way I can control my headlines and my inserted keywords with more precision.
How To Create The Perfect Landing Page Experience
If your landing page conversion rate is low, then there’s probably a disconnect between what your visitors want and what your landing page is actually serving them.
Make Your Landing Pages More User-friendly
You can quickly improve your users’ landing page experience by focusing on these “low-hanging fruits”:
- Make your landing page content useful, relevant, aesthetically pleasing, and trustworthy.
- Make your website mobile-optimised. You can use Google’s tool to test how mobile-friendly your landing page is.
- Increase your landing page’s loading speed: use a faster server, avoid excessive JavaScript, reduce redirects, load your page asynchronously, and compress images.
- Format your pages so that they’re scannable; highlight the important points.
Personalise Your Landing Pages
Improving the quality of your landing page experience is all about giving your visitors what they’re looking for. The more personalised it feels to them, the better their user experience will be.
For example, suppose you’re selling an enterprise CRM solution called CRMPro. If you’re talking to the Director of Sales & Marketing of Acme Inc, saying: “Can I take 10 minutes of your time to show you how CRMPro can fully automate as much as 67% of your prospecting, lead generation, and lead nurturing processes?” will likely get you invited into their office.
Now walk a few doors down the hall and say the same spiel to the Head of Operations and they’ll probably throw you out the window. Because as the Head of Operations, they’re tackling entirely different sets of problems.
But if you say: “May I demonstrate how CRMPro can fulfil and scale your day-to-day processes, while cutting down as much as 78% of your resources?”, you’d get a warmer reception.
It’s the same thing with Landing Pages. The more targeted and customised your messaging is to the person interacting with it, the better their user experience will be. So target a specific persona, consider their unique needs and situation, and customise your messaging to appeal to their pain points.
One way to apply that is to create landing pages tailored for your ad groups.
If someone searches for “lawyers in London specialising in trusts and inheritance disputes”, and you lead them to a page talking about your gazillion other lawyerly services, chances are high that they’ll bounce.
That’s no bueno.
Google uses bounce rate as a marker of the quality of user experience your landing page is providing. So keep it low by making your landing page scratch the exact itch your users are dying to scratch.
Leverage Dynamic Keyword Insertion
Dynamic Keyword Insertion is when you dynamically insert specified keywords into your ad copy based on the search query. The idea is to serve a hyper-relevant ad because the ad automatically adjusts to include the user’s search query.
So because you’re creating ads that are ultra-customised to user searches, you boost your ad relevance, which boosts the CTR, both of which help boost your Quality Score.
But relevance shouldn’t stop at the ad level.
As we touched on earlier, you’ll boost your Quality Score by ensuring that your landing page content is consistent with every component of your ad.
But the problem with that is how time-consuming it is to create a dedicated landing page for every target search term you have in your ad campaign.
When we built a Google Ads Campaign for Pristine Homes (a family-operated home cleaning service in Sydney), we improved the Quality Score so well, we were able to significantly reduce their overall cost per lead by more than 51%.
Not only that — our Google Ads campaigns resulted in a 119% increase in monthly leads for them too.
How exactly did we achieve those results?
Well, we created a combination of service and location ad campaigns. This necessitated targeting around 875 keywords. Which also meant building (and maintaining!) 850 ad groups and more than 240 perfectly matched landing pages.
If you do this manually, it could literally take hundreds of hours!
Luckily, we didn’t have to.
How?
By using the Convertaholic Dynamic Keyword Insertion tool.
Basically, this DKI plugin lets you dynamically insert the user’s search query into your landing pages.
This cuts down your work considerably because you need to build just one to a few landing pages. And then, by dynamically inserting keywords to the said pages, you can instantly create thousands of landing page variations that perfectly match your target search terms and ad copy!
Simply use the plugin to update your core page, and it will update all the landing pages.
For example, for users that searched for, say, “Paddington home cleaners”, the Convertaholic DKI tool allowed us to insert “paddington” in pre-specified locations throughout the landing page.
The resulting landing pages created “perfect matches” between the search term, ad copy, and landing page —which then significantly improved Pristine Homes’ conversion rates.
This plugin is the “secret weapon” we use to quickly and easily put together thousands of landing page variations for our clients. This allows us to focus our resources more on optimising Quality Score (and therefore ad profitability) versus building and maintaining landing pages.
On top of allowing you to create unlimited landing pages, the Convertaholic DKI plugin also:
- Lets you insert exact geographical locations in your landing pages, making them even more ultra-targeted and hyper-relevant to the search query.
- Lets you dynamically customise your page images to match the exact keywords your customers are using to click on your ads.
- Lets you create groups of keywords and change multiple sections of the page by changing your single primary keyword.
- Lets you set keywords as persistent allowing you to use those keywords throughout your website and create dynamic content even when values aren’t set in the URL.
Therefore, by using the Convertaholic DKI tool, you too can leverage DKI to improve all of the three Quality Score components!
Bonus Tip: Track your campaigns to improve your historical ad performance.
Managing PPC Campaigns involves automating, optimising, analysing, and tracking them.
Thankfully, there are now tools that automate many of the repetitive tasks involved. One such tool is Adalysis which can track QS at the account level, campaign level and ad group level:
Account level
Campaign level
Monitoring your Quality Score at high levels lets you see, in one glance, which areas need attention and which campaigns have the most impressions or searches.
Google also lets you view your historical Quality Score — and its components — for all of your keywords. This data is available via four new columns:
- “Qual. Score”
- “Landing page exper.”
- “Ad relevance”
- “Exp. CTR.
Image:Google
Using Google Ads, this is how they show it in their reporting:
Image Source: Google
Image Source: Google Ads
Whichever reporting tool you use, the most important thing is having a prioritised list of the profitability-boosting tasks you need to do.
This will help you focus your efforts on the things that will truly move the needle in terms of boosting the performance of your campaigns.
Conclusion
As a marketer, you want higher returns in less time and with less ad spend.
You want to:
- Only invest your resources on the keywords that are most likely to convert.
- Increase the chances of Google serving your ads.
- Improve your ads’ chances of appearing in the top spots.
- Lower your cost per click (CPC) and pay half of what your competitors are paying.
Increasing your Quality Score will achieve all those, provided you use QS as a measure of the relevance and usefulness (to your audience) of your keywords, ads, and landing pages.
I’ve laid out 10 tips above that will help improve “The Big Three” factors that directly impact QS: ad relevance, landing page experience, and CTR.
I also demonstrated how the Convertaholic Dynamic Keyword Insertion plugin can improve all 3 Quality Score components, which may translate to a lower cost per click as well as cost per conversion, thereby skyrocketing the profitability of your campaigns.
Having said all that, my ultimate tip is this:
Instead of obsessing over your Quality Score as a metric, use it as a compass to help you create campaigns that align with the intent and pain points of your prospects.
It’s impossible to have an account with perfect 10s for everything.
If you focus on becoming skilled at discerning what they’re trying to do when they perform their searches, and if you focus on delivering helpful and relevant information, then not only will your Quality Score improve over time, but so will your ads’ performance and profitability!
And if you need any help improving any aspect of your Google Ads campaigns, then book a no-strings-attached, absolutely-no-obligations-whatsoever (and did I mention FREE?) call with me.
During the call, I will run through your landing page, SEO, Google Ads, and anything else you’d like me to evaluate for you.
Then I will send you a recorded video of the audit so you can keep referring to it as you implement my actionable tips.
Sounds good? Book your FREE 30-minute strategy call here now.
