To build a successful PPC campaign you must optimize the factors that influence quality score such as landing-page relevance and keyword performance. The goals of the major search engines are twofold: Improve end-user experience, and increase shareholder profitability.
Although the algorithms search engines use to calculate quality score are not public information, countless advertisers and search-engine marketing professionals have provided data that contribute to a solid understanding of the most important quality score factors.
One factor is landing-page relevance. Bidding on a keyword that is unrelated to the content of your landing page often results in a cost-per-click penalty. Google penalizes you by raising the minimum cost-per-click for nonrelevant keywords to an amount that can make profitability impossible.
The same applies to your organic rankings. If your Web page is unrelated to the search query, it does not show in the results. The paid search rankings algorithms are becoming synonymous with the organic ranking algorithms, so be sure that your PPC keywords are relevant to their respective landing pages. Another important factor is keyword performance. The search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN that provide a pay-per-click advertising service make money when users click the paid ads.
Keeping this in mind, you can figure out that certain keyword and ad copy combinations earn the search engines more money than others. These pay-per-click search engines show ads based on an algorithm that determines maximum profitability for the search engines. The driving force behind this algorithm is the click-through rate, or the ratio of clicks on an ad to the number of times that ad is displayed. You can lower your average cost-per-click of a keyword by increasing your click-through rates. Often, you can pay less for a higher position than your competitors if the click-through rates of your keyword and ad combinations are higher.
Google has admitted that there are over 100 factors involved in determining quality score, but you cannot optimize for all those factors because you cannot know what they are. You are best served by optimizing your landing pages for relevancy and optimizing your ad copy for click-through rates.
One way to examine how well your PPC campaign stands up to the quality score algorithm is to analyze the minimum bids for the various keywords you are bidding on. The minimum bid acts as an indicator of that keyword’s quality. For example, keywords with a high minimum bid have the lowest quality score, and inversely those with the lowest minimum bid have the highest quality score. In Google’s case, keywords with high quality scores tend to average about $.05 per click. The search engines flag keywords with minimum bids of $1.00, $5.00, or more as low quality. Sometimes you should just remove these low quality keywords, especially if they are not relevant to your campaign. Other times, you may want to keep those keywords active. This involves making changes to your landing pages and ad copy to increase relevancy.
Google builds trust in the advertiser over the course of a PPC campaign. Google has an interest in keeping its long-term users happy. Therefore, with greater trust from Google comes lower cost per clicks and higher rankings. In this way, PPC campaigns are becoming more and more like search-engine-optimization campaigns where longevity alone can provide positive results.
