Hi Guys, I am new to PPC and have recently set up an account for my business. I have done quite a bit of reading up on adwords and am led to believe that CTR is the most important thing to help increase quality score which will then bring down my cost per click. I am currently doing some testing on different ads but is there anything else I can do? It seems to me the best way to increase my click through rate is by bidding the highest and being number 1, however this is too costly for me to compete against some of the big boys in my industry. Is CTR the most important thing or are there others? Any help would be much appreciated.
Hey Rodeo, I think you are talking about two different issues in here. Quality Score & CTR. Quality Score is independent of CTR. Rather if you have good QS your ad is show more and hence your ad might get good number of clicks & this in return might help u reduce cost. So, please figure out what do you want to improve. If it is your QS ...try improving your bids, ad copies and also the landing page. The combination of these 3 should help you increase your overall QS
Hi aceofadsense, Thanks for the response. As you can see I am still learning! Sorry i was under the impression a good CTR was a big contributor to a good quality score. Is this not the case? With regards improving my quality score I am looking at using 5 ads (on rotate evenly) to see which gets the best CTR and then constantly dropping poor ads and adding new ads. I am also in the process of putting some good relevant text on the landing pages which relate to the ad itself. If for example I am bidding on the term cheap taps there will be some decent text on the page regarding cheap taps such as pros and cons etc. Is there anything else I should be looking for to increase quality score? I am led to believe that 7 is a good quality score but I obviously want 10's! I am also using dynamic keyword insertion..... will this be a benefit? Someone has suggested to me to try different landing pages for each keyword. I.e. have a landing page for cheap taps with appropriate text on, and then for the term bath taps have a different page.... At the moment they land on the same page so creating new pages would be a pain but I will do whatever is necessary.
Click rate is the main component of Quality Score. Increasing your bid will increase CTR but only because bidding higher gives you a higher position and ads in higher position get a higher click rate. What you and most others fail to realize and understand is that QS takes position into consideration. You're looking only at your absolute CTR. If increasing bid increased QS, you'd then have a bidding war because the top position would get the highest QS. Google doesn't want that. In short, QS is a comparison calculation of your CTR vs that of others using that same keyword and normalizes for position. Your QS will not change simply by increasing your bid. You must increase the quality of your ad. In other words, create better ads. Don't use five ads, only use two. You're only diluting your test which may not give accurate results in your analysis. As I said, the biggest component of QS is click rate. If your keywords are relevant (which represents about 25% of the score), nothing you do on your landing page will increase QS. The base QS seems to be 5 so a 7 means you are above average and that's good. I don't like to see QS below that value. Of course, you want to get higher because QS is used for the ranking (higher ranking for the same bid) and cost calculation (higher QS reduces your CPC). Read more in my Adwords FAQ.
I don't think CTR is the most important thing because I have some with high CTR and low conversion rate and some with not high CTR but good conversion rate. I think if your keyword, ad and landing page are targetting for the same thing the conversion will be higher right? but if you simply increse your CTR by increasing the bid you will get a lower conversion.
CTR is the most important as far as QS is concerned. True, doesn't mean that the high CTR ad will have high conversion rates. What you want is the higher product of both figures. That sometimes means going with a lower CTR ad but the conversion rate would have to be that much higher to compensate for a lower QS and higher CPC, a lower CPS in other words. But that rarely happens in my experience.