How to increase CTR to improve Google Adwords Quality Score

by Frank Rui Jiang on December 31, 2009

We all know that Keyword Quality Score in Google Adwords determines how relevant your keywords are to the advertisement, and the secret of achieving maximum quality score has never been fully revealed. Recently I’ve been testing the impact to quality score by *Click Through Rate* Vs. *Ads relevancy to keywords*, the campaign is targeting local entertainment business. In this case, all the paid search keywords are local keywords, so click through rate was pretty high.

Before show you the results, you may want to watch this video officially released by Google. This is an introduction of Google Ad Auction system by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian. After this video, you will have a better idea why CTR is so important to quality scores.

During first two weeks, I created 3 variations of ad copies for each ad group. All of them were including at least two main keywords and name of the town, so search engine users will find highlighted keywords when they search. I also chose to show ads with better performance rather than display evenly because I wanted to have high click through rate as soon as possible. Here were the campaign results for first two weeks:

how to increase google adwords click through rate

As you can see, CTR was 5.67% for the overall campaign. Not too bad huh? With above 5% click thru rate, really relevant keywords to the ads, and there were only 6 of total 1000+ keywords reached maximum quality score of 10. The most of the rest were 7, so you may think it is the time to improve the relevancy of landing page? Not yet, according to Google Ad Auction video, we know that quality score is highly dependent on CTR (contribute nearly 60%) and landing page only contributes 10%. This makes perfect sense, as higher CTR means visitors prefer your ads and more clicks can generate more revenue to Google.

adwords quality score is highly dependent on click through rate

I created a new ad copy and put it into all the ad groups, this ad was more about what benefits people can get rather than *keyword relevance* and I switched ad displaying option to be showing evenly so that it could compete with other 3 keywords related ads. Guess what, after another two weeks, I had to remove at least 2 of 3 keywords related ads because they were so outperformed by the new ad copy. The campaign results of last 7 days were: (click through rate was nearly tripled)

how to improve google adwords quality score

And most importantly, the number of keywords with quality score of 10 became 108, remember I had only 6 in the first two weeks?

So here are the tips to increase your Google Adwords Click Through Rate from my experience

- Target very specific keywords, most of my keywords contains three words.

- Don’t use broad match unless you have time and money to reach maximum amount of audiences.

- If you do local business, add town name in every keyword.

- You don’t have to spend loads of time on tweaking your landing page.

- You do have to spend large amount of time to think, create, test and monitor your ad copies.

- Always use *display evenly* option to show your ads.

- Don’t design ad copies for your keywords, design for your customers, think what benefits you can offer. (Btw, sometimes if your ad contains a keyword too many times, i.e. highlights 3-4 times in your ad copy, it actually looks spammy)

- Use Google Analytics to check what people exactly search, and eliminate as many unnecessary keywords as you can, such as “suck”. (i.e. negative keywords)

What’s your experience on improving adwords click through rate? Please share your mind here :D

Related posts:

  1. How much money did you waste on Google Adwords
  2. How To Easy And Fast Create Massive Google Adwords Ad Groups
  3. How to find paid search keywords that customers really use
  4. 5 things you could mess up Google Analytics data
  5. Advanced Goal Completions Segmentation by Google Analytics

{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

Adwords Consultant August 19, 2010 at 8:18 am

i m a Regular visitor of your blog you really have a nice Content, i m also a PPC Consultant working on the same topic do support me.

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