AdWords Quality Score: Improve Quality Score, Improve PPC ROIYour AdWords Quality Score is a measure of the quality, relevance, and performance of your pay-per-click advertising campaigns. Because it affects both: 

the position of your ads and your cost per action,

AdWords Quality Score has a major impact on your PPC success and profitability. 

There are a number of uncontrollable variables in paid search advertising, but luckily, you ultimately have control over your Quality Score and can take steps to improve it.

One way to improve your AdWords Quality Score is to use a keyword management solution like WordStream. Proper keyword management and organization increase Quality Score via multiple avenues:

Better keyword data: WordStream helps you perform continuous, personalized keyword research, so you can build your campaigns on the right foundation, ultimately increasing the relevancy of your keywords to your ad messaging and website content.

Effective keyword grouping: Organizing keywords into small, tightly related groups is the key to high AdWords Quality Scores. This practice makes it much easier to create specific ads and landing pages targeted to your intended audience.

More relevant ads: WordStream includes tools to help search marketers efficiently write AdWords ads that are compelling and speak to the searcher's query, increasing click-through rate (CTR).

Let's take a closer look at how better keyword management can help you achieve high AdWords Quality Scores.

AdWords Quality Score Begins with Keywords

Your keywords are the foundation of your PPC activities—if your keyword research is weak, your whole AdWords account will suffer.

Most search marketers depend on free, public keyword tools to build their PPC keyword lists. This can really harm your relevance—you have no way of knowing if the general, popular keywords these tools spit out are truly relevant to your business and customers.

Your own Web analytics and log files are a much better source of keyword data. These private sources tell you the actual words and phrases that real people use to find the products or services you offer. You'll also have an accurate picture of which keywords drive the most traffic and

conversions, so you can focus your PPC efforts on those areas first, without making guesses based on general global data.

WordStream takes advantage of this renewable source of relevant data to build your private keyword database. And with our JavaScript tracker in place, you'll be adding new traffic-driving keywords to your database every day.

Grouping Keywords to Improve AdWords Quality Score

WordStream also helps you find the best way to group your keywords for an optimized AdWords campaign structure. The key to high Quality Score ad groups is—you guessed it—relevance. All the keywords in an ad group should share a high degree of meaning.

For example, let's look at a pet store's keywords. It's obviously suboptimal to lump all your keywords into one group, and try to attract customers with a generalized advertisement for pet supplies. For one thing, a keyword like "pet supplies" is bound to be very competitive (and expensive). On the other hand, you can't create a unique ad and landing page for every single keyword in your list—you wouldn't have time to do anything else.

The solution is to group your keywords by theme, and then segment those groups into subgroups, and so on, creating a hierarchy of small, manageable keyword groups. Now you can write a targeted ad and landing page for each group. This makes your life easier, and it's good for your Quality Score.

WordStream simplifies the keyword grouping process with tools that suggest segments based on a relevance algorithm, then do the sorting for you with the click of a button. Finding and sorting 20 closely related keywords in a database of thousands could take hours in a spreadsheet, but takes just seconds in WordStream.

Writing High-Quality AdWords Ads

To reiterate, your AdWords Quality Score depends on several factors, among them:

The relevance of your ad to the keyword The relevance of your ad to your landing page The historical performance of your account The click-through rate of your ad

Clearly, the quality and effectiveness of your AdWords ads is important. Likewise, you need a system for creating ads that won't eat up all your time.

WordStream can help here too, with ad text tools that help you determine which keywords to include in your ad's headline, description lines and URL to best represent that ad group.

Using the right keywords in your ads not only improves your rankings, it catches the eyes of potential customers to increase CTR. This, in turn, further improves your Quality Score—so you continue to get more exposure at a lower cost.

Learn More About Improving Quality Score and ROI

Check out our free e-book on PPC best practices for more tips on increasing your relevance to maximize pay-per-click ROI.