The importance of high ad quality scores in today’s search arena really struck home today when one of the keywords I manage for a client based in the automotive accident vertical reached a £30 minimum bid to appear on page 1.

Today we’re going to be focusing on testing, reviewing and changing. The great thing about PPC is that if something doesn’t work you can change it almost instantly, the only question is how to set up a fair and qualified test.  Don’t forget to read part 1 of Tips for Optimising Quality Score.

Below are some general rules that I would suggest to anyone struggling with poor ad quality scores:

• Create between 2 and 3 different ads. Try a different message; call to action or USP in each one this way you’ll get a feel for what the people like.
• Turn ad optimisation off and rotate ads evenly. This will allow ads an even share of voice and you will begin to see valid representations of CTR, conversion volumes, conversion rates, CPE, ROI and so on, depending on your success metric.
• Run this test for around 14 days. This should be long enough to allow enough data to be collected which will let you decipher which style of ad performs the best.
• Now repeat the process with new ad copy. However, focus on the style of ad which proved to be most effective in the first round of testing.
• This time round try fiddling with the content of your ads rather than the actual style of the message.
• Make sure you are running on the correct match type. If this is broad match make sure you have a long negative keyword list which excludes any variation you don’t want associated with your product.
• Finally, make sure the content of your landing page is reflective of your ad copy. The ad has told the user and Google what to expect, you already have them interested, don’t pay in vain.

I find a good tip to ensure relevance of keyword to ad copy and ad copy to landing page is to have your keyword featured in the ad where possible and part of the ad in the landing page.

Happy marketing guys, next week we’ll be looking at analytics and how to use it to effectively track and optimise your online strategy.