Editorial Articles

There is plenty of information out there on the importance of bid management strategies, as well as tools to maximise campaign ROI. However, as anybody who’s managed a search campaign recently knows, bid levels are only part of the equation.

Search engines are looking to maximise their yield from advertising – just as you are – so efforts to align your interests with those of your search partners can reap rich rewards. Search engines (primarily Google) have effectively shifted the onus of finding this balance to the advertiser through the introduction of quality score.

Quality score helps alleviate the opportunity costs search engines incur with every paid ad that goes unclicked. By incentivizing marketers to optimise the relevance of their ads to specific keywords and to improve creative effectiveness, search engines boost paid click rates and yield – completely independent of your bid.

The formulas search engines use to determine the price an advertiser pays per click factor in both bid and quality score. There remains a dependence on other advertisers – their bid and quality score. But, those are not in your control. So what’s left? Quality score of your ads! And while this makes the campaign management process more complicated, it also creates lucrative opportunities for savvy search marketers.

What tools and tactics can search marketers adopt to hone relevance and copy effectiveness in a large-scale search campaign? Here are a few of the most effective that will deliver a clear competitive advantage.

Expand usage of PHRASE & EXACT matching.

Does most of your traffic come from BROAD match terms? Again, reviewing raw search queries can determine whether this is so. Instead of using these queries for negative ideas, use them for positive ones. Broad or expanded match keywords are an easy way to grow volume quickly, but high quality scores come from tight alignment between keyword, ad group, and creative.

Improve this alignment by adding new keywords you discover and setting them to phrase match. For example, let’s say the BROAD matched keyword “dry fit clothing” generates a click from the search “dry fit running shirt”. Assuming you sell running shirts, add “dry fit running shirt” as a new keyword on PHRASE match. By closely matching what visitors are looking for, this new keyword has a better chance of garnering a higher quality score and making better use of your marketing spend.

Speak to the user’s intent.

As you expand your keyword list using the tactic above, make sure to consider copy alignment. How closely aligned are your keywords and creative? For each keyword in your campaign, make sure your ad copy speaks directly to the user’s intent as much as possible.

Check your ad groups accounting for your top 20% of spend – is the ad copy in these ad groups relevant to the keywords? When adding keywords, work out whether they should be added to existing ad groups or put into new groups with custom ad copy.

Finally, ask yourself if your existing ad groups could be split more finely into thematic groups that get their own creative. A quick way to check this across your entire keyword set is to look at the overlap of tokens (words) in keywords and in creative. A low overlap could be a signal that it’s time to write some new creative.

Cut poorly targeted impressions.

Regularly review “raw search queries” that drive traffic to your site. These are the actual queries visitors type into the search bar before clicking on your ads. Are you attracting clicks from visitors looking for something you don’t offer? To get a trickle of site visits on these keywords, your ad may be showing thousands of times. If so, the low clickthrough rate is dragging down your quality score.

To fix this common problem, add negative keywords to cut out these unwanted clicks. Shrewd use of campaign and group-level negatives can dramatically improve clickthrough rate, boost your quality score and save money.

Test. Learn. Apply. Repeat.

Don’t ever be satisfied with your copy performance. Continually tune your message and test the results.

Top Tip.

This is a simple one but can make a huge difference. For brand term searches – set up two ad groups. Have the first ad-group set up on exact match for your brand term. In a separate ad group set up the brand term on BROAD match but also have the exact match as a negative keyword. Setting this up right can save you a fortune and boost click-through rate and quality score.

Clearly, boosting relevance and clickthrough rates throughout your campaign can dramatically improve performance. How far can you go? Google goes so far as to assign a quality score to every keyword you’re bidding on. So applying these techniques to all keywords in your account (or even just top referrers) can be a gargantuan task. And just like with bidding, automation can scale these efforts far beyond what a team of search marketers could do manually.

A search engine marketing tool that offers automation can analyze your raw search queries, suggest new negatives, measure relevance, and test creative versions for you. This can give marketers a strategic advantage over their competition, tightly aligning the components of campaigns to deliver maximum ROI. Combining automated techniques to boost quality score with effective bid management is a potent combination with the potential to deliver results that will make you – and your search partners – smile.