How To Get A Good Quality Score In Adwords.

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scottspfd82

scottspfd82

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I struggled a lot with quality score for a long time when I was first starting out, and I know I'm not alone. So here's a few tips on how I do it, hopefully this can help a few people out.

Start off by buying your own doman (duh!), and throw up a little article site on it. An example that I'm running right now is collegescholarshipsolutions.com. I'm not planning on ever sending any traffic to the main part this site, but just in case people end up finding it organically there's some content with an affiliate offer.

Now, all of my landing pages are going to be on this domain. When I go to adwords to set up my first adgroup, the URL and the destination URL are both going to be to collegescholarshipsolutions.com.

I should also mention that keywords in the domain name, and the title tags are crucial here. So make sure they're relevant to your offer.

Google will assign me a quality score based on the content site. After I'm assigned a quality score, I can go into "edit keyword settings", and change all of the URL's to point to my landing page on my domain. It's the same website, just a more relevant part of the website. So I'm actually doing what google wants me to do by sending visitors to the most relevant part of my website.

In order to maintain a good QS, you'll need a good click through rate. So start off bidding high, and design your first ad for click through, not conversions. After you get a nice history established you can start slowly lowering your bids, over time you'll get cheaper and cheaper clicks and can still stay in the top 3 spots.

And that's how you get a good QS. If you want some more detailed info you can check out my latest blog post via the link in my sig.

Hope this helps someone.
 


Good Newbie post, but

1) Cloak your affiliate links.
2) I'd get rid of the adsense. Your loosing leads to people advertising the same offer that your trying to push.

Ex
 
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The index page isn't my landing page. I'm not driving traffic to it. The adsense is just there to monetize in case people find it organically.

Agreed about cloaking affiliate links. This is an older campaign that I'm running, normally all of the affiliate links would be cloaked. The site still gives me a great QS, so it's serving it's purpose.

And yes, the post is aimed to help newbies more so than people who are already successful with adwords.
 
Even if you leave in the adsense, you should filter the Ads displayed because your loosing leads to 10-20 cent clicks.


loosingwithadsensejs2.jpg



My 2 cents

Ex
 
You're right, no adsense is better. The point is that I build these content sites for the sole purpose of getting a "great" quality score right off the bat.

The truth is most of the sites I build for this purpose have articles ripped from ezinearticles, and ugly ass templates. I just picked this one out for illustrative purposes
 
Hi Scot,

Thanks for the tips, do you link your landing page to the main page? if yes, can you tell me from your example, which one is your landing page you use for adwords? is it the scholarship button on the top of navigation bar? if you dont link it through main page, how does google detect your landing page is part of your website? Thank You
 
scottspfd82 said:
So start off bidding high, and design your first ad for click through, not conversions.
Click to expand...

What the hell have you been smoking? ALWAYS go for the conversions. Clicks aren't going to pay your rent and QS only matters if you plan on running the offer long term. But, hey, if you want to burn your money, be my guest. I realize this thread is about getting a good QS, but never bid more than you have to.
 
1) Include an xml sitemap in your footer and register it with google webmaster tools ::

Google Webmaster Central

2) Always include at least one outbound link to related relevant content. I usually just select something from wikipedia, and hide / bury the link. It's a traffic leak, but it's there to beat the quality score.

3) at least two articles on their own pages of relevant content with an appropriate keyword density.

4) core keywords in H1 and H2 tags

5) privacy policy

6) physical address in footer

that should do it ...

 
bricklayer said:
6) physical address in footer
Click to expand...


Which physical address? Or just make up one? I'm struggling with that now on one of my local sites for what to put as the contact address or if even to put one. It just looks more legit when you do.
 
Bidding high increases your CTR, and that is supposed to lower your PPC cost.
Once your costs go down, you lower your bids but keep the lower rate.

That's what they say... I have seen it happen on mine before...
 
bidding high is a catch 22 in that you can bid high then google will lower your bids. Once they do if you lower your bid down typically the move you way down the totem poll and you ctr goes to shit and you bid goes back up. At least that's what I've seen. I can only speak for highly competitive niches like mortgage and cash advance as that's really all I play with. Not sure about less competitive stuff.
 
cashflowrusty said:
Use your web hosting company address! :-)
Click to expand...

Or you could use that address of your private domain reg service, or whatever else appearrs in the whois info for your domain.

I personally rent a mail box at one of those mail places, and the address they give you is an actual physical address that makes it look like a "suite" instead of a box. totally worth it. I use it for the address at the bottom of my CAN SPAM compliant bulk email broadcasts as well.

Landing page is like 40% of your quality score these days.
 
cashflowrusty said:
Bidding high increases your CTR, and that is supposed to lower your PPC cost.
Once your costs go down, you lower your bids but keep the lower rate.

That's what they say... I have seen it happen on mine before...
Click to expand...

This is true as I just experience this for some Halloween offers I am running and I still maintain positions 6-8 for some highly competitive keywords even after pausing the campaign for a day or so to adjust my landing page. Also, the high CTR made some of my keywords go from OK to Great with no other changes. I also recommend using Adwords Editor to group your keywords as this helped as well. Adwords Editor grouped my keywords and separated them out into 4 adgroups instead of two and that really helped as well.
 
privacy policy definetly helps. Strangely i also find that an outgoing link to a relevant semi-high PR site also helps give you credibility.
 
Does adwords check for duplicate content? I was wondering if copying a page from wikipedia related to my niche onto my main page (not landing page) would help my quality score.
 
duplicate content's more relevant for site indexing, seo and appearing in the serps, right?

when you're creating a silo/themed site, the scraped wiki content improves your QS if your content and ad are theme-related.

SpaceMonkey said:
Does adwords check for duplicate content? I was wondering if copying a page from wikipedia related to my niche onto my main page (not landing page) would help my quality score.
Click to expand...
 
here is something ive noticed which is funny i guess to me but...if you have google and the network both clicked and you have a low bid, your ads wont get shown on all the google search networks or atleast some of them..anyway like you can see a 20% CTR and then lower your bid and suddenly it will be 3% ctr because its now being shown on just google and your bids are too low for the search network (such as ask.com) anyone else had that happen?
 
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