In addition to bidding as high as I can on keywords in my Adwords campaign, is there anything else I can do to get better placement?
– Jason
There are a few steps you can take to maximize your place on Google Adwords. Of course, how much you bid on a keyword affects how well that ad will be placed — i.e. whether that ad is first, second, or tenth place in the sponsored results. However, there is a little more nuance to your ads ranking well.
Like other affiliate marketing strategies, the performance of your Adwords campaigns depends largely on how well you target your promotions. To measure how targeted your ads are, Google gives every PPC ad a “Quality Score”. The higher the Quality Score of your ad, the less you have to spend to have it rank well.
So, in addition to the cost-per-click (CPC) that you bid on (i.e. are willing to pay) there are several other factors to consider. These include: (1) relevance of the ad to the keyword search, (2) relevance of the landing page to the ad, and (3) the click-through-rate (CTR) that the ad receives.
Ad Content
The more relevant that you’re ad is to the keyword you bid on, the higher placement it will receive for the amount you bid. When you place an ad through Adwords, it contains several elements: title, text, and URL. The more relevant the title, text, and display URL are relevant to the search query, the better Quality Score your ad will receive.
For instance, let’s say you bid on the keyword “betting website,” and the title of your ad is “Betting Website,” your ad text is “Use our website for all your betting needs,” and the URL is “www/bettingwebsite.com.” You will receive a higher quality score because all elements (title, text, and URL) of your PPC ad feature the keywords that you bid on.
Conversely, if you try to reduce your average CPC by bidding on a less competitive words such as “Dog Walking,” but the title of your ad is “Betting Website,” the text reads “Place wager on anything,” and the URL is “www.bettingwebsite.com,” then your ad will receive a much lower quality score. This is because it is a less relevant search result for Google’s users.
Landing Page
Google will also gage the relevancy of you ads landing page. Again, Google want its users to find the most relevant page, even if you are paying to have those users come visit your site.
It is important, then, that the landing page for an ad is relevant to both to the keywords you’re bidding on, and the content of the ad itself. You can increase your quality score here by featuring relevant text content on the landing page and making sure your meta info (such as page title and description) are also relevant.
Click Through Rate (CTR)
One of the ways that Google gages the relevancy of page is by monitoring how many people click-through to from the search results. The more frequently that users click t your ads, then, the higher quality score they will receive. This is not only better for their bottom line, but it provides a kind of crowd-sourced quality assurance of their search results. After all, if no one clicks on a search result (paid or otherwise), it is probably not very relevant to the keyword/search-term.
But Google will also give your Adwords account a quality score, here, but taking into a consideration your CTR history. The CTR of all your ads and keywords in your account, will be considered, as well as the historical CTR of the display URL in your ad’s particular ad group.
It’s important, then, that you monitor CTR across all your campaigns very closely because every campaign can affect the Quality Score of every other campaign. Google does this to reward the more efficient and skilled Adwords advertisers because those advertisers show their users more relevant search results.
Quality and Reputation
Ranking well in Adwords is about more than bidding high. It’s about delivering relevant ads that perform well. The better your Quality Score, moreover, the less you will have to bid for any given spot in the sponsored results section.
Basically, Google has built a reputation as the premier search engine because of their quality control standards. These standards, however, apply to both their organic and paid (PPC) results. So the more you respect their reputation and quality standards (i.e. are honest about your ads), the better your PPC ads will rank in their search results.
Daryl, SEM Manager
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