The main purpose of pay per click advertising is to drive high quality traffic from your target market to your website for the lowest cost possible. To do this depends on the relevance of your adverts, your keywords, and your landing pages, both to each other and to your target market.
Once your keywords, ad groups and landing pages are completely synergised, you will be rewarded with a higher position in Google's SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), and you will pay less every time someone clicks your ad. You may also see a metric called “Quality Score” increasing.
Quality score is one of the most important metrics in a Google advertising campaign. Quality score is scored out of 10 (1 being the most expensive and 10 being the cheapest). If and where your ad will be shown on the SERPs is all down to your quality score. After a recent update, the default quality score for newly added keywords is 6; however this is subject to change very quickly. Quality score is calculated by an algorithm based on the following factors;
The relevance of your ad copy - When you are organising your account, it is important to ensure that your keywords are in a tight-knit ad group; this enables you to create ad copy that is relevant to all of the keywords in your ad group. This means that when a potential customer enters a relevant search query into the Google search box, your ad will be relevant to their search. Which leads us nicely onto the next point...
Click-through rate (CTR) - Even though no one knows just how much weighting CTR has on Google's quality score, it is pretty obvious that Google count this as one of the most important factors, if not the most important.
If your advert is relevant to the searcher's query, they will click on your ad and enter your site in the hope that they can find a solution to their problem through your company. The more people who click on your advert, the more likely Google are to realise that your website is relevant for this particular search and increase your overall quality score accordingly. To increase your click-through rate, make sure that your ad copy is relevant.
Landing page - You have now created the tight-knit ad group and created a relevant advert that reflects your keywords. Now you need to think about where on your site you are going to send your traffic. Obviously, you need to send people to a page that is relevant to your keywords, and to your ad copy.
For example, let's say you are creating a campaign for a web design agency that specialises in ecommerce websites, but also provides customers with various digital marketing solutions. The company owner has asked you to create a campaign that focuses on their responsive ecommerce website design service. You will need to point your adverts to your ecommerce landing pages, not your digital marketing pages, as this will decrease the relevance of your adverts, meaning that they will not be shown as much, if at all. Furthermore, if your ads are pointed at irrelevant landing pages, every click you receive will be really expensive, and most importantly, potential customers will click onto the website, see that they are on the wrong page, and leave, increasing your bounce rate.
Unfortunately, people do not often have time to look through your website to find the exact page or product that they require. The less clicks it takes for them to find what they need, the more engaged they will be, increasing the likelihood of the customer completing your goal (e.g. signing up to your newsletter, downloading your e-book, purchasing a product, booking an appointment, or making enquiry about your company). When your tracked goal has been completed, this will be recorded in AdWords as a conversion. An increased click-through rate at a lower cost means that your cost per conversion is decreased, and your return on investment is increased!
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