Web Genius Blog

How Google ads are ranked…

It’s important to understand that where your ad ends up in the list of ads that appear does not depend solely on how much you bid. Google also takes into account what it calls your “quality score”. 

Read the following excerpt from my book ‘The NZ Small Business Superhero’s Marketing Handbook’ and discover how Google Adwords can help increase traffic to your website…

According to Google your quality score is calculated by considering the keyword’s clickthrough rate, taking into account the relevance of the ad text and the landing page that the ad links to in relation to the search query, the historical performance of the keyword across the Adwords network and “other relevance factors”.

In other words, this last point is Google’s “secret sauce” that they are not prepared to reveal details about. The main point is that to get a high quality score there needs to be a close relationship between the keyword being searched for, the text of the ads and the text of the landing page. And as each keyword builds up a history in your account, the clickthrough rate for that particular keyword is an important component of your quality score. If you have a high clickthrough rate and quality score you don’t have to bid as much for the position, so it’s important to take account of the points raised above.

Before you start, you need to get your head around how the broad structure of Adwords operates. Firstly, you set up an account, and then you can have up to 25 campaigns in your account. However most small businesses will only ever need one campaign. The exception to this will be if you target two completely separate geographical regions, in which case you will need a separate campaign set up for each region.

Within a campaign you set up a number of ad groups - one for each theme (we discussed themes in the section above on organic optimisation) or product/service category within your business. Setting up tightly-themed ad groups within your campaigns is a crucial component of an effective Adwords campaign and we look at this in more depth in the section to come on keywords. Within an ad group you have a set of keywords and ads which are related to the theme.

To read more, you can purchase my book ‘The NZ Small Business Superhero’s Internet Marketing Handbook’ by clicking here.

Posted by Richard Calkin on 22nd May, 2012 | Comments | Trackbacks
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