What is Quality Score?

If there is one segment of pay-per-click that keeps me tossing and turning at night – it’s Quality Score. For those of you familiar with Quality Score, you understand its importance in saving you money and displaying your ad at a higher position. Quality Score is a numeric value between 1 through 10, 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest that is given to each keyword within your PPC campaign. This number is determined by a very complex algorithm that Google has created in order to help rank how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and user’s search query.

Why Use Quality Score?

Just imagine if every business using PPC was able to control their ad solely by how much they were willing to bid on each keyword - that's a pretty scary thought! This methodology would mean that the company with the highest PPC budget would win, even for keywords that they weren't relative to. This scoring system is in place to ensure that there is an even playing field amongst businesses and helps users find the most relevant information.

Tips to Improve Your Quality Score:

1. Create Very Targeted AdGroups
   One of the biggest mistakes PPC marketers make is that they try to clump all of their keywords into the same AdGroup. If you want to improve your Quality Score, separate them as much as possible. For example – accommodation keywords, lodging keywords and hotel keywords should all have separate adgroup. I would bet you could break down the your hotel keywords to be ever more specific!
2. Use Your Keywords in Your Ad Title and Copy
   You don’t have many characters to play around with when writing your ad, so make sure to use keywords contained in the AdGroup you’re writing for. This will make your ad more relevant to what search terms are triggering your ad and make it more likely to be clicked.  
   
3. Optimize Your Display URL
   Something as simple as adding a keyword to the end of your display URL can help your ad stand out. For example if you’re targeting boutique hotel keywords make your display URL www.example.com/boutiquehotel. Remember keywords are bolded when they match the users search query.
   
4. Send Them to a Relevant Landing Page
   Get out of the habit of sending every ad to your home page. If your ad is targeting "suites", send them to a landing page that has ample information about your suite rooms. Also, let’s not forget what the main goal of your campaign is – to convert to a sale. Quality Score aside, you want users to find exactly what they are looking for when they click on an ad directing them to your site and you want to provide them with relevant information when they get arrive without having to look around.
5. Create More Than One Ad
   Don't put all your eggs in one basket! Create numerous ads per AdGroup and test them to see which one has the best click through rate and then use that copy moving forward.

If you really want to work on improving your Quality Score, get in the minds of your consumers and write copy that is compelling, interesting, informative, targeted and most importantly, makes them want to click. The goal is to get your click through rate as high as possible as this has a direct influence on your Quality Score. The more often your ad shows and is clicked on you are positively effecting your score.

If you make changes and start noticing that your click through rate is improving but your quality score doesn’t change don’t get discouraged! Your campaigns historical click through rate factors into your Quality Score so give it time to improve your average - think big picture!

For those of you that have attempted to venture into the world of pay-per-click advertising, you quickly learned how overwhelming of an experience this is, especially for someone who has zero or minimal knowledge of search engine marketing. I bet you felt like you weren’t in Kansas anymore: keyword research, CPC, and quality score – OH MY!

Luckily for you, Google has unleashed a new product that makes playing the PPC game much less daunting! AdWords Express is the easiest way to advertise on Google, takes minutes to set-up and requires very little management. Simply choose a category that is most relevant for your ad, write a short headline and description, choose a budget you feel comfortable spending monthly and VOILA! You’ve just created an advertisement for your business. From there, AdWords Express will automatically estimate the number of clicks you will get for your designated budget – remember you’re only paying for clicks!

How can hotels utilize AdWords Express?

AdWords Express will capture customers by using a technique called radius targeting. For instance, if you’re a hotel in Chicago wanting to utilize PPC to target travelers within the city, this product will be perfect for you! Customers who enter "hotel" as their search query, and are within 25km, will be shown your ad. Adwords Express will also target customers who are outside of this 25km. If a customer in Atlanta is searching for a hotel in Chicago and enters "Chicago Hotel" within Google, they will also be shown your advertisement because they used your city identifier!

How to creatively use AdWords Express:

• Advertise your hotel – people in your area are searching for you! 
  • The family down the street has family in town and needs to research places for accommodating them
  • The local business needs meeting space to discuss their latest figures
  • The local soccer club looks to host a holiday party
  • A wedding planner or bride is planning an area wedding
• Advertise your hotel restaurant or spa – don’t just think about room nights!
  • What if the competing hotel around the corner doesn’t have a restaurant or spa? Just because you may not get the revenue from a guest staying at your hotel, doesn’t mean you can’t capitalize on them using other services you offer.
  • Capture local business employees who are looking for a great place to grab lunch or have an after work beverage.

Because AdWords Express also displays your ads on mobile devices, this is a great way to capture people at the most critical time within the purchasing process – when consumers are looking to act! By using services like AdWords, you are able to streamline your business directly to the consumer searching for you – possibly for keywords you were not able to rank for organically! Sometimes you have to pay to play.

Cow. Sheep. Barn
Apple. Orange. Carrot.

Can you find the item that doesn’t belong here?

From the earliest stages of learning we are taught how to group objects and words by meaning and similarity. However, some advertisers lose this fundamental logic when building their PPC campaigns. Building your PPC campaigns in the correct structure is essential to the success of your advertising. The cost of improper keyword structure can be detrimental to your campaign and hard to recover from.

Some of the pitfalls of poor campaign grouping are:

• Low quality scores
• Higher keyword CPC
• Lower ranking on search engine results pages

Unfortunately, these pitfalls totally defeat the way a successful campaign should operate.

Often, advertisers think it's extremely difficult to structure a PPC campaign correctly. It's not! If you employ the grouping tactics you learned back in grade school, you'll see that grouping keywords in a PPC campaign is just as easy as grouping shapes, animals, and foods. Think topically when deciding how to build your campaigns and ad groups.

Here’s an example of effective grouping:

• Campaign > Seattle Attractions
• Ad Group > Seattle Space Needle
• Keywords > Hotels near Seattle Space Needle, Seattle Space Needle Hotels, Space Needle Hotels Seattle

As you can see, this grouping of keywords is structured so that the overlying theme of the campaign is attractions in the Seattle area. Since you're building campaigns for a hotel, you will want to be careful about bidding on keywords not containing the word "hotel." For instance, you could bid on "Seattle Space Needle" and gain plenty of impressions; however, it is likely that you won't receive a large volume of clicks, thus resulting in a low click-through rate and even lower quality score. Even if you received a high number of clicks, the traffic you'd get would be low quality and result in low conversion rates. You can also see that the ad group theme is Seattle Space Needle and the keywords stick closely to this theme.

Here is an example of bad keyword structure for the same campaign and ad group:

• Ad Group > Seattle Space Needle
• Keywords > Hotels near Seattle Space Needle, Hotel near downtown Seattle Center, Seattle restaurants near space needle

The keywords in this ad group focus on the Seattle Space Needle, but really aren't relevant to each other. One keyword references restaurants, while the other two reference hotels.  Google will read this grouping as poor relevancy, and thus will reward you with one of the pitfalls of poor ad group structure--definitely not the type of reward you'd like to see.

We'll discuss keyword selection and more in future posts. If you still aren't sure that you will master the art of building a PPC campaign, visit Google's AdWords Help Center to learn more. Once you've learned how to set up your PPC campaign, you're on the road to pay-per-click success!

Google is making big changes to its traditional search engine results by integrating Google Places, and more recently, Google AdWords.  Previously, each component of Google was separate from the others, living in different sections of search results and functioning independently. Today, a heavy emphasis has been placed on location-based search results and location targeting. Thus, companies that are not ranking well in Google Places or using geographic targeting in Google AdWords could be missing out on customers.

How does a business that isn’t ranking well in Google Places nor has a presence in AdWords have a chance at succeeding in the local search market?

Google Boost is the answer. This new pay-per-click product marries Google Places and AdWords to provide a low-cost, simple, local search solution for small businesses and advertisers who want to capture a local market.

Google Boost ads appear at the top of the search engine results page among sponsored search ads. Boost ads look relatively similar to standard Google Places listings with the exception of a blue pin marker rather than red.

Google Boost Ads are only offered to advertisers with a physical address. Signup is easy as Boost Ads are a part of Google Places. An advertiser only has to sign in to their current Google Places account and add Boost Ads to their marketing mix. Even better, like standard Google Adwords pay-per-click ads, a business is only charged when someone clicks on their ad.

Here are a few specific reasons why Boost Ads are a viable local search advertising option for small businesses and businesses focused on gaining interest from consumers located near their physical address.

Location is key!

Recent studies show that customers tend to include their intended location in their search queries. Studies also show that with the rapid growth of mobile search, customers will search for businesses while on the go and expect to see local results based on their mobile signals or GPS location. This makes it important for advertisers to have positioning in the top of the search results. Google Boost offers top positioning both of PC and mobile browsers.

Ease of use

For inexperienced advertisers and small businesses, Google AdWords may seem overwhelming and unmanageable. Google Boost offers a simple, almost hands-off approach to pay-per-click advertising. As stated above, signup is easy. Once set up is complete, the Google algorithm does all of the work for you by choosing keywords, bids, and running automatically.

Important company info presented up front

There are a few simple pieces of information most users seek when looking for a company: Location, quality, and contact information for the company are typically the most important. With Boost Ads, users get this info immediately. Since the ads are actually Google Place page results, customers are able to see the website, user reviews, location and company description all from the search results. For an extra fee, the company phone number can be added to the listing. This is very important for mobile users as the Google click-to-call feature is activated allowing customers to call a business directly from the search results on their mobile phone.

In short, Google is concentrating on local search and geographic targeting, and you should too. You may not be ready for the world of AdWords and this is fine (although we highly recommend that you consider PPC), but Google Boost gives you an opportunity to focus on what matters to Google while getting your feet wet in the great world of pay-per-click advertising. Undoubtedly, Google will continue to integrate the various components of its search marketing program. Therefore, staying ahead of your competition (as well as Google's frequent additions and updates) should be a primary goal for your search engine marketing efforts.