Gaming Google Quality Score

Ok, this title may be a little misleading. You aren’t really gaming the quality score by following these tips, you are just working with their system and giving Google what it wants. You may have heard some of these, or they may be new to you - but I can personally vouch for the fact that these methods work. Without further ado here are 4 techniques to acheive that high quality score:

1. The “player” approach. It’s hard to get a good CTR and quality score with low bids. So when you start a brand new campaign, come in with a high max CPC. Higher than you normally would run the campaign. It may cost you, but it should help your initial CTR and allow you to snag a good score. Then you can back the bids down slowly.

2. Adgroup structure. Put all your keywords into adgroups with common semantic meaning. Google will see this similarity and reward the group with a high QS. Don’t allow poorly related keywords to creep into your adgroups. Keep the number of keywords as low as possible in each adgroup.

3. Clearing bad results. Sometimes despite all your best efforts, you will experience the Google slap and your bids will shoot to $10. When this happens its time to clear these results away. Delete all keywords, ads, ad groups. Make a change to your landing page that the Google bot will see. Wait 20 minutes. Rebuild the campaign in the reverse order than you deleted. Hopefully, this will bring your bids back down.

4. Super relevant landing pages. This is probably the best way to affect QS. Make every landing page relevant to every keyword. Google loves to see the exact keyword used in the search on the landing page. There are several PHP based ways to capture the search and display it on the page. When Google sees super relevancy, they reward it with super quality score.

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7 Comments »

Comment by Sucker

2007-12-11 18:40:11

Great post! I never thought about starting off with a high CPC.

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Comment by Scott

2007-12-11 18:44:36

Nice tips. I have tried #3 before when I got the dreaded slap. It went right back to the high bids. But I didn’t really change my landing page so maybe that was the key.

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Comment by Jeremy

2007-12-12 02:59:24

Can you post some links to some php scripts for #4.

I have heard about these and even seen some but never got to read a tutorial about them and integrate them into my own page.

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Comment by 45n5

2007-12-12 18:25:55

@jeremy - something like this will do it

http://lists.evolt.org/archive/Week-of-Mon-20040202/154831.html

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Comment by Stephan Miller

2007-12-13 19:34:22

I knew the high CPC works. Thanks for the rest of the info though.

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Comment by pranz

2008-01-10 07:58:21

Hey, nice article.

Very informative.

Thanks mate!

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Pingback by Recent pay per click shake ups | CDF Networks - Affiliate Marketing Blog

2008-03-06 02:01:11

[…] behind the scenes at Google. Good luck to everyone trying to recover from this one. Maybe these tips can help. Posted in Pay Per Click by Chad on 02|02|08 Subscribe to CDF […]

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