With any PPC campaign, optimisation is always a key factor in making sure that performance stays on the right track.
There are a few different ways of optimising search campaigns in 2022, and we’re going to explore some of those methods in this article.
Quality Score
A quality score is one of the key indicators of how well your keywords are performing. The quality score is made up of three components:
- Landing page experience
- Ad relevance
- Expected Click Through Rate (CTR)
Your keyword is ranked against these three indicators and is given a score out of 10.
How to Improve Your Quality Score
To improve the quality score, you need to look at each of the three indicators.
Landing Page Experience
When looking at landing page experience, this takes into consideration:
- How fast the landing page loads
- How relevant the keyword is to the landing page
- What type of content is on the page
- Is it full of images?
- Are there broken navigation buttons?
- Are there no navigational tools etc?
For example, if your keyword is “blue t-shirts” but you’re directing people to a landing page that doesn’t mention “blue t-shirts” anywhere, but instead mentions black shorts; this will then get a low quality score.
To improve the landing page experience, you need to make sure that the site is optimised well for both mobile and desktop, as well as making sure the page is relevant to the keyword.
Ad Relevance
Ad Relevance means finding out how well the keyword relates to the ad copy shown to the user. Sticking with the same example, if the keyword is “blue t-shirts” but you’re serving customers an ad that is talking about black shorts and leggings, this will then receive a low quality score.
To improve this you need to make the keyword relate to your ad copy. Insert the keyword naturally in the ad copy while serving the user all the relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) your business needs.
Expected CTR
This looks at the expected CTR of your keyword. To do this the first two indicators of the quality score are taken into consideration, and then it will also look at the search terms that are coming through via the keyword.
If you have a lot of search terms coming through the keyword that isn’t relevant, this could be because you have the campaign set on a broader match type. This will lower your quality score.
To combat this, you need to ensure that you are going through the search terms and removing any irrelevant searches. If you have it on a phrase or broad match option, you will be getting some other terms that Google thinks are still relevant to the keyword, but might not necessarily be related to the product.
Other Ways to Optimise Your Search Campaigns
Keywords
If you see keywords that haven’t converted for quite some time and you’ve spent time trying to optimise them in the account and on-site, it might be time to review these.
While the keyword may seem relevant to the business, you do need to try and think about the intent behind it. Is this keyword there to research, to learn, or is there an action required?
For example, someone searching for travel information will have different end goals than someone looking to buy flights.
Bid Strategy and Conversions
Search campaigns can be used to get in front of potential customers at any point of their customer journey, whether they’re in a researching phase or buying phase.
Making sure that you have the right bid strategy for the campaign will also help. If the campaign is trying to educate people, then you would want to go with the ‘maximise clicks’ option and put some conversions that show what people are doing on the site – whether it’s clicking a button or staying on-site for longer than 25 seconds.
If it’s a sales lead, you’ll want to go with the ‘target Return On Ad Sales (ROAS)’ option to ensure the campaign is hitting the goals required, as well as making sure that it’s profitable for the business.
If it’s lead generation, you’ll want to go with the ‘maximise conversion with a Cost Per Action (CPA) target’ option to ensure that you’re getting good leads through for a good price.
Thanks for reading! I hope you learned something to take away and put into practice on your Search Campaigns. Our team of Pay Per Click experts are just one call away, get in touch to optimise your search campaigns today.