PRO TIP NUMBER ONE: Quality Score
From a ranking of 1-10 how good are your AdWords? Well, Google will tell you using their Quality Score. This is a core KPI and a main indicator that your are doing a good job! Google takes into account three core factors: click-through rate percentage, landing page experience and the ad’s relevance (CPC bids also factor too). Each keyword has a quality score and Google will not only tell you what it is, but where you can improve too. Simply click the little speech bubble next to a keyword under the ‘status’ column. See below (and yes, that screenshot was taken from an account I manage):B-B-B-BONUS ROUND
One thing to note is that Google will decrease your cost per click if you have a 10/10 QS by 50%, 44% for 9/10 and so on, 6/10 being neither up or down. However, 1/10 will sting you a 500% INCREASE in CPC, so please, remove, pause or change keywords with these low quality scores. It doesn’t take Russell Crowe from A Beautiful Mind to work out that a 500% increase in CPC will have a pretty big impact on your cost per acquisition.PRO TIP NUMBER TWO: Search Partner Networks
This is an easy one to miss, and if you did miss it, it’s very easy to change. Search Partner Networks are a range of third party websites that your Ads can appear on. Not to be confused with Display Ads (which use images, not text). The issue is, you can’t choose the websites and your ads will often appear on completely irrelevant sites where they don’t get clicked; this will ultimately drag down your click-through rate percentage, which we don’t want. To make sure your Ads are not appearing on these sites, go to settings and under “Networks” UNCLICK ‘Search Partners”, see below:PRO TIP NUMBER THREE: Search Terms
Again, and an easy one to miss, but super important! Within your management dashboard, your keywords section will tell you how many clicks each keyword gets. The thing is, most Google users don’t actually type your exact keywords in. Search Terms allow you to see what people are really typing into Google that triggers your ads to display; this will change dependent on what match type your keywords are set to (broad, phrase or exact). So if a lot of your keywords are broad match (which will often be the case for newbies), you could find your ads are displaying to the wrong crowd, and getting clicks that won’t convert (ie: draining budget). Add the irrelevant ones to your negative keyword list and start reining in the broad phrase keywords. See below for where to find it: