29
2016
Nov

Improve Your Click through Rate & Quality Score Part 2

Last week, we explored improving the Click through Rate (CTR) to drive the Quality Score with a focus on reducing impressions. The other way to approach this is to increase the amount of clicks coming in through AdWords. There are many theories on how to increase the clicks, but only one that almost everyone agrees on.

The concept is simple and straight forward but complicated to implement. Make the headline about the search query and think of this as a conversation. The search query is what the person asked, your ad headline, and to a lesser extent the body of the ads is what you say in response. The search query is simply the words formulated by the person and submitted to the search engine. It is “in their words” what “they are interested in”. If you want a person to respond to your ad or page content the golden rule is to talk about what they are interested in. This may seem easy but trust me it’s not!

Applying this concept starts with separating keywords into smaller Ad Groups. By doing this, the number of variables connecting to your ads is smaller. The goal of this process is a one word to one ad relationship, but the maintenance cost of that can get out of hand quickly. Once you throw in the complications arising from broad match keywords and quality score, variations place a complicated problem on your hands. This is made even more complicated when you consider the matching changes that Google made for close variants.

The common-sense answer to this is to break the keywords into very tight groups of keywords where the variation in keywords will not impact the response to the search. In other words, we want keyword groups that you would write the exact same ad for. This creates more ad groups resulting in different challenges. For example, split tests will lack the volume needed to get meaningful results, so a different testing strategy must be formulated but that is for another tip.

In this process, start with your highest value keywords that have the lowest quality scores, and you will get the maximum return on your time investment.