← The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
PPC Basics: How to Improve Quality Score (Episode 483)
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Foreign hello and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris and today I'm going to talk to you about to improve your quality score. This is a part of my PPC basics where I'm going through a lot of basic things that everyone should understand and are commonly misunderstood. So it's great to form a foundation of important things that will build over time because things like quality score, things like how to manage a Google Ads account, I mean, these are critical and often done wrong. So whether you're new or old in Google Ads, this should be important information for you. That's what I try and do with every episode. You can subscribe. I put out new episodes every Monday and all I talk about is Google Ads. So if you're running Google Ads for your business, you're trying to get a job in Google Ads Management, you are involved in Google Ads in any capacity. This is a great free resource for you to learn and every single Monday. And I've been doing it for years and I don't plan on stopping. It's something I enjoy doing and trying to lift up the PPC community. You know, we're not, we're not really known as a lot of upstanding, honest people. And I try and change that. I try and help people to understand, hey, you know, there's the right way to do it in Google Ads and then there's the wrong way. And I try and educate people so that we can bring up the quality of this community, bring up the integrity of the community by delivering the one thing that we can all promise our clients, our boss, ourselves, and that's just quality of traffic, trying to get quality of traffic, trying to pay for clicks that deliver quality to your website, to your client's website. Whatever you're doing, that's, that's what you can only focus on. And as you progress, things get better and better. And hey, you eventually make money from it. You eventually make money from that quality of traffic purchasing. That's what the whole goal of this podcast is about. So if you, if you like this, if you enjoy that kind of deep discussion every week, join up right here. I'm on YouTube and most people listen on the podcast, but you can also see me on YouTube as well. I also send, also answer questions every week. I'll be doing that this week, as always, I'll be answering a question and you can send in a question at paid search podcastmail.com Send in your question there. Be patient. Usually takes a couple weeks and I will get to your question. I'll usually answer you let you know that your answer is coming up so you don't miss the miss the answer on the show. And yeah, I have a question all the way from the UK asking about display campaigns, YouTube campaigns, you know, demand gen display remarketing. How does it all work? Where can you go from from phase three and phase four of Google Ads. Should you engage in demand gen campaigns or remarketing or display? I'm going to talk about that. But first the main topic of the show. I'm going to jump into how to improve your quality score. I'm going to define it, I'm going to talk about why it matters, how to improve it, and then nine specific things that do not improve your quality score. I'm gonna share all of those things for you in today's packed episode. So stay tuned. Real quick, I want to tell you about the reason this podcast can continue. I'm very thankful for my sponsors@optio.com PSP who offer you a special favor just for listening to this show. They know that you care about your Google Ads performance and and this tool is designed to improve the performance of Google Ads accounts. It is designed to capture data, analyze it and spit back perfect. Well, well, well suggested optimizations that can improve your Google Ads campaign. Did you know if you lower this bid on this keyword it could improve your cost per conversion because it's bidding too aggressively? Did you know that if you add this negative keyword it will free up a lot of your search impression share? Because you're wasting a lot of search on these particular keywords, these particular search terms and it's not doing you any favors. Did you know that your landing page stopped working yesterday and you now have an error that's showing up? Did you know that your search impression share has dropped significantly? Your budget is now insufficient to this degree. I mean these are critical things to know and we're all limited by the same thing. You're limited by time. You can save time by getting more done with optio.com PSP get a free trial of the tool. That's 28 days for free. You can try the whole tool for free 28 days@optio.com PSP use the link in the description, try it out, tell them that Chris sent you and you'll get that special offer. Let's jump in how to improve Quality score. Alright, so very quick I'm going to define and then talk about why quality Score matters. Quality Score, as simple as possible, is a rating from 1 to 10 measuring how relevant Your keywords, ads, web pages are to the person that is seeing your ad in that moment. So this quality score is represented at the keyword level. Every keyword will have a quality score number assigned to it. Now, that statement used to be true 100% of the time. It is now true 60, 70% of the time. Very often now, Google does not show quality scores for every keyword, even if it's getting traffic. So I want to qualify that statement because I use. I've, I've said that statement many times for many years. And it's no longer true that every keyword has a quality score. At least that we can see. I'm sure that every keyword has a quality score, but sometimes Google does not report that information. If you haven't been doing Google Ads very long, Google Ads really hasn't changed. What, what, what's changed is the way that Google shows us data. We've lost a lot of aspects and things that, that used to work this way, and now it still works a lot of the same way, but Google shows us that information differently. The only thing that is really different is how keywords function. That specifically has changed. But everything else is largely the same. But keywords no longer have quality scores for every single one. So who cares? Why does quality score matter? Well, money matters. And that's how you get clicks on Google Ads. Money matters. It costs more money for you to run keywords with a quality score of 1, 2, 3 than it does to run keywords with quality scores of 7, 8, 9, and 10. So higher quality scores lead to a lower cost per click. An advertiser with a quality score of one on every single keyword, let's say this very unfortunate advertiser, has a quality score of 1 on every single keyword. They may theoretically pay 10 times as much then compared to an advertiser with a quality score of 10 on those same potential keywords they're going to show on the same searches, they have a quality score of 10. The advertiser with 1 is paying 10 times more than that other advertiser. So why does quality score matter? Because $100 a day will go 10 times further if your quality score goes from 1 to 10. So you'll be able to reach more impressions, get more clicks, more sales, more, more calls if you have a higher quality score. Now, quick note here. Very few people enjoy quality scores of 10. So let's set your expectations properly at first. Quality score of 10 is basically impossible for anyone advertising on keywords that are not basically their company name. You have an opportunity to have a quality score of 10 on your company name and maybe something really, really relevant to what you do. But most people are going to cap out around 7 or 8 most of the time. Your best keywords are really not going to be able to get higher than a 7 or 8. So do not listen to this podcast. Thinking, oh, I need to do what he said because, because I have sixes and fives and sevens and eights and I want all tens. No, please do not misunderstand. Your goal has not changed. Just because I'm talking about quality score, which I don't like to talk about very much. Cause I think it's a huge distraction in Google Ads. Your quality score is unlikely to accelerate past 7 or 8. It gets increasingly difficult. There are some factors that we'll talk about in a minute that will limit your ability to accelerate past maybe a five or a six. Okay, so how, how can you improve your quality score? I'm going to give you six steps. And if you follow these six steps, you will be able to put yourself in a position that will be most likely to achieve your best quality score. Okay, so here are these six, six steps. Number one, establish a campaign goal. That one, hopefully, hopefully these first three or four should be really easy for you. Establish a campaign goal. For example, I want people to contact me for my rodent removal services. I remove rodents from houses and barns and yards and all of that. That's what I do. I'm the rodent killer. Capture, whatever, right? I know there's a lot of businesses that do this. So that's an example for today's example. Let's say that that's what you do. You remove rodents of all kinds from residential properties. So that's my goal, is I want people to contact me to hire me for my rodent removal services. Great. That is a goal. Number two, once you've established your goal now, number two, establish an ad group target for that goal. For example, my overall goal is rodent removal services. One ad group should represent a target, a subcategory of that goal, which would be, let's say specifically squirrel removal. People have rats, groundhogs, I don't know if groundhogs, let's say voles and moles, perhaps in their yard, something like that. I don't know if groundhogs get into houses, but they have all these different types. One ad group. And I remove a lot of squirrels from people's attics and walls. That's a big part of what I do. So I'm gonna have an ad group just for that. And that is my dedicated purpose of that ad group. So that's number two, establish an ad group target. So now you have a campaign goal. Number one, you get, you want to get calls, get leads, you know, have people contact you to hire you for your rodent removal services. Number two is, okay, part of that rodent removal is my squirrel and then you're going to have more. But let's focus on just this one. Alright, so that's it. First two, right there should be pretty easy. Number three, within that ad group that is specifically for squirrel removal, choose keywords representing searches around that target. Really simple. Okay, this should immediately, all of these should flow very quickly for you. For example, squirrel removal services, squirrel removal companies near me remove squirrels from attic. Right? You can make up two or three of these probably right off the top of your head. Now there will need to be a few more keywords. I don't think you should add 50, I don't think you should add 30. I think you should add maybe 15, 20 at the most to this ad group. You need a few keywords that focus on that target. You do not need a huge number of keywords here. Pick a few. And then I have other podcasts that talk about how to expand on those keywords, how to test and do some research on those keywords. If you, if you don't know, I offer consulting training services to demonstrate and show you that. You can find it on my website, Chris Schaefer.com but you know, I have resources in my podcast that talk about that process. But the main thing is 1, 2, 3. We're on our third one. Adding keywords. Right? Number four, a little more complicated. It's gonna require a little bit of creativity. This one, this one might stop you a little bit. I find that writing ads tends to be the biggest grind for me because creativity is tough. Coming up with keywords is not tough, but you know, writing ad copy, that can be tough. Alright, so here we go. Number four is write ads that speak directly to those keywords. Okay, so remember we're removing squirrels. We are a rodent removing company. This ad group is about removing squirrels. So the ads that you write should speak to removing squirrels. Okay? Write ads that speak directly to those keywords. So use language about removing squirrels. You don't say pest removal. That pulls back from the theme of the ad group. Stay within the theme of your ad group. Stay tightly associated with the keywords you want to use. Not the exact keywords you've written, but you want to stay closely associated with the theme of the keywords that you've written. And an important note to make here that doesn't mean saying your company name. I find that people make this mistake a lot. I'm just gonna stop just real quick right here and and just gripe a little bit because who cares if your company's name is Bob's rodent removal company. That is not helpful. That does not improve your click through rate chances. That does not improve your relevance. It is a waste of incredibly valuable characters in ad copy that is going to be read in 0.5 seconds as they're scanning the page. You have a very short window to get a first impression on someone and show your ad and convince them. I do that. I do that. Click. Click here, click here. I'm the best one. Saying your company name is a very dumb way of putting yourself in that position of being noticed. I don't care if you have a cute name. There was recently a plumbing company in a town near me that I was driving past and I saw, I saw the name of the company. I won't say what it is but let's just call it chewing gum Plumbing. I mean it was just like some completely obscure unrelated thing plumbing company and they probably and they have this really weird looking storefront. You know it's all kinds of weird colors. This is the kind of company I would think would put their. They're like our name is very memorable. I'm going to put my company name in my ads. I want to brand. This is not the time to do that. Stop Google Ads. Search campaigns are not the opportunity to push your brand. You do not brand. You do not acquire or push forward brand awareness in your lead generation search campaigns on Google. Really dumb idea. So stop using your company name. Just I just see it all the time and it really bugs me. Something I immediately suggest not doing when I see it. Alright, so that's four. That's it. So you've company goal. You've established an ad group target. You've chosen keywords around that target and then you wrote ad copy specifically around those keywords. And then number five, hopefully this is not a huge step for you but you point ads to the page that speaks to that specific targets. So for this example company, my rodent removal services I have a page specifically about squirrels hopefully and I point people to that page because they're looking for not rodent removal. They don't care about rodents in general. They care about what you can do for squirrels. Do you do squirrel Removal, because that's when I'll give you a call, that's when I'll fill out the form. That's when I'll book an appointment with you. Is like, oh, they're nearby and they handle squirrels and they seem trustworthy and, you know, seems like this is how I get in touch with them. And if you can convey those things, that they're in the right place at the right time and that you're a trustworthy source and that you know, you're in their area or whatever, you know something relevant to them. As long as you're relevant with what they're looking for, the chances of them contacting you now that you've gone through these five steps has accelerated. And guess what? That's the same point as quality Score. Google's on your side when it comes to quality score. They establish quality Score to try and force advertisers to do what they should do and not try and game the system. They want people to have a good experience on their platform. So they came up with quality Score to try and encourage people to build campaigns that encourage that streamlined, very, very natural process of keyword search, ad copy, landing page success. So if you have done those things, the last step, step six is just repeat, repeat this process for every service and product that you sell. Those five steps, repeat, repeat, repeat. That's how you improve your quality score. Okay, so I'm going to do a quick lightning round here and then I'm going to get to the question of the week right after this lightning round is going to be these things do not improve your quality score. You ready? I have nine things and hopefully I step on some toes here. I'm going to put my hiking boots on and I'm going to stomp around. And I hope one of these perks up your ears because there's a lot of misinformation out there, a lot of baloney of people thinking, I do this, I do this, and that improves my quality score. No, it doesn't. And I'll give you a list of nine that I find to be most common. Number one, changing your keyword match type does not improve your quality score. Going from broad to phrase to exact, it's a gimmick. It's baloney. It does not directly improve your quality score. There might be some things that tend to be more true with broad and tend to be more true with exact, but there is no strategy to say, I'll just change your match type and it'll fix it. Nope. Baloney. Not true. Number Two, using every keyword match, type, using broad phrase and exact, all in the same ad group will improve my quality score. No, it doesn't. That is not true. So stop doing it. That's not a strategy. That's a gimmick. That's a hack. And hacks don't belong in Google Ads. Save your hacks for that stupid SEO stuff. Right? Hacks and all. Shortcuts and stuff. That's not what I talk about here. That's silly. Number three, adding more keywords. Oh, well, if you add another 10, 1500 keywords, that will improve your quality score. No, it doesn't. Number four, using a specific bidding strategy. If I use maximize conversions, if I use max clicks, if I use target roas, that will improve my quality scores. Nope, nope. Again, gimmick. If I increase my budget, that will improve my quality scores. Right, because Google's going to reward people who spend a lot of money on their platform. They really like big spenders and high budgets. No, they don't, Google. And that comment's half right. They do like big spenders. They do want you to spend more on their platform, but they do not reward you with better quality scores. There are plenty of people that spend a lot of money and have absolute crap quality scores, believe me. So that's not true. Number seven, having a better or higher optimization score. You know that little thing right there under the recommendations, there's a recommendations tab. And you can see your optimization score is 50%, 70%, 5%, whether that's 5 or 100%. That does not improve your quality score. Optimization score is not quality score. I'm gonna say that again. I hope you're listening. You. Your optimization score, which is on your recommendation tab. That is not what I'm talking about. Optimization score is not quality score. Do not mix those up. They have extremely different goals and standards by which they are ranked and scored. You say. Well, Chris, shouldn't we talk about getting your optimization score up? No, because it doesn't matter. I've talked about optimization score before. Optimization score you can completely ignore. It's baloney. Worthless. All right, next, number eight, having a higher ad rank score. Having a poor average or excellent ad rank in your ads does not directly affect your quality score. And then number nine, adding more extensions assets to your search campaigns, adding more site links, adding more images, adding your location extension, adding a phone number. Those do not affect your keyword quality score. They might affect, to a very small degree your overall ad rank, but it does not affect your the integrity of your quality score. Which is only decided keyword ad landing page level ad extensions ad assets do not affect that. Alright so there we go. Hopefully that is useful And I have a question here over from UK from Elias. I'm going to get to that. Before I answer his question I want to remind you of my sponsor which I appreciate very much. For those of you that check it out optio.com PSP I only ask one thing. I don't ask you to donate. I don't ask you to go to my page and sign up for my newsletter or join a higher tier mastermind platform where I can sell you more services about I give away all this for free and my sponsors help pay for all of this and I just ask that my that you guys give it a try. Optio.com PSP for a free trial they're great people. I literally talked to the to the CEO and you know the head people there pretty often. They're really nice, really nice people. I like them and trust them. Optio.com PSP for a 28 day free trial all right Elias gonna finish up the podcast for us. Writes in hi, Chris Elias here from London uk. First time question, short time, avid student. You've been a massive help. Massive help both on the podcast and in our one on one sessions. Big thanks. I started Google Ads only a few months ago with your help. Feels like I've been doing it for years now. Thank you Elias. For those of you that don't know, I offer one on one consulting training, coaching services, whatever you want to call it, you have a problem. Whether you need me to build something for you and demonstrate it or optimize or just answer deep questions about Google Ads. That's what my consulting training services are for. Elias has been a phenomenal student. I've told him many times I wish all of my students listened and responded as well as he did. Very sharp learner. So I don't know if it's him or if it's me. Maybe it's both. Maybe I'm a good teacher and he's a good student. So I appreciate that. All right, should I advertise? Here's his question. Sorry. He asks should I advertise on Demand gen or display for remarketing and lead generation? Is Demand gen just a high quality version of display campaigns? How does it work? What is it? Okay, that's the first question he has. There's another question coming up at the end but first I'll answer this one. I'm not going to go into Demand gen but the short Answer is this, you should. I believe the only proper thing to use what I, what I use, what I would use is if it was my money or my client's money, is display campaigns, not demand gen. Demand gen does not show on websites, standard, just normal websites. It's going to show in the Google Ads or sorry, The Google environment, YouTube, Gmail, stuff like that. I'm not interested in that. I mean if, if I want to do anything that I can do in demand gen, I can do better in display and actually get reporting and target and get that kind of stuff. I am not interested in demand gen so I would recommend staying away from demand gen. It's just kind of a simpleized version. It's kind of like the smart display campaign. And if you know anything about companies that label their products, you know, just because it says smart that doesn't mean that it's better. It just means that it's simpler for you to do. And what does simpler mean? Simpler means there's less options, less choices, less data, less ability to adjust and respond. So if you want the full capacity, the full dashboard of options, display campaigns is the only way to go. Furthermore, when it comes down to okay, what do I do with display campaigns? Chris? Well, I think dollar for dollar, I think remarketing is really the only investment that's truly worth it. I think every business that can remarket should put a few bucks into it. I think, I think it's worth it. Even if you get absolutely nothing from it as far as what you've tracked, you don't see any conversions. I think it's worth it spend, you know, five bucks a day, $100 a month maybe something like that. I mean you don't have to spend a lot but at least every impression that you're getting is 100% free until they click on it. It's like a free billboard to anyone who's been to your website. And you know, I think that's worth it. So remarketing 100% yes. Display, display campaign, I think that's worth it. It's a cheap add on for sure. Now the general use, what people usually use display for, what it was built for, is to show on the wider Internet everywhere else. You know you can, you can, you can show ads on anything that serves the Google, the Google network of, of ad reach is massive. So in general, should you use display? I guess. Yeah, I think so. It, I think it does help to lift your brand. I was just speaking with a company yesterday and they had invested hundreds, thousands into new Display campaigns, very targeted display campaigns. And they were experiencing leads, lead acquisition in places they were not advertising before. You know, they were getting conversions in from unexpected areas, unexpected places. And they couldn't account for why it was happening or where is it coming from except for they assumed that it was coming from display. I mean that seemed to be the only logical conclusion which I agreed with. I think that's definitely possible that people will get, you'll get a general uplift and most of the time it's going to be completely immeasurable. I don't mean immeasurable that it's so huge it's immeasurable. I mean immeasurable that it's so small it's very difficult to measure because you may not get any hints of success. You're going to get really high bounce rates, you're going to get no conversions, your click through rates are going to be really low. It's going to look like a bunch of really dumb sites that you know have nothing to do with your business. But it can help. Okay, so let's continue on with the last part of the question. Secondly, he asks, do you think interruption based advertising on Google for lead generation is worth putting effort into once a campaign has reached phase four or phase three? Or should we instead focus on just trying to push higher up the funnel and go after little higher funnel traffic? Is that the best way to go rather than display campaigns? So yes, as I said, I do think display campaigns are worth it. But for most of you listening to this, I don't think that you should because what I find is that very few companies reach phase three and phase four and have fully saturated their market. I think, I think an account, a company that is successful in what they're doing, they're getting lead acquisition sales and they're successful and they're profitable and they've actually spent to the full capacity on Google that they potentially that they could in their search campaigns. To do all of that at once is really rare. So most of the time you should, you know, you should focus on just optimizing and spending more, optimizing and spending more based on the success. Most people are not going to hit the ceiling on that. That's a really tough way to go. Rarely leads to success every time. It's a difficult path to take. I mean that's why this, that's why there's always people struggling for success in Google Ads is because it's hard to attain it, it's hard to reach it. So Mo. So yes, I think display in video campaigns are great, but most of the time, if you have an extra 300 bucks, $3,000, $5,000, I usually think the best way to spend it is to put it into search. Unless you're able to maintain really good success and there's literally nowhere else for you to grow, you've saturated your market and there's nowhere further that you can spend your money. Okay. And with that, that is all that I have. If you would like to reach me, you can find me chrischafer.com I offer management services, coaching services. Otherwise, you'll find me right here every Monday on the Faith Search podcast. We'll catch you guys next week.