This is part of my series of posts that I’m putting together about how we approach PPC campaign management for our clients.

My planned PPC Campaign Domination topics:

• Landing page optimization
• Campaign organization
• Google AdWords ad extensions – Part 1 – What are they & how do they work
• Google AdWords ad extensions – Part 2 – Our client test

Today’s topic is…

Google AdWords Quality Score Optimization

Before you yawn or leave because you don’t know what Quality Score is – you should realize that the success of your PPC campaign may in fact hinge on quality score. So it’s kind of important to know what it is and how to make it work for you!

I recently did a presentation “Google AdWords Tips You Can’t Live Without” at the Portland Online Marketing Summit where I had 4 minutes to give a couple of Google AdWords optimization tips. Most of my content was based on quality score but 4 minutes isn’t much time – so I wasn’t able to finish all of my tips for the crowd. What follows is an extended presentation of my AdWords Quality Score tips plus a few bonus tips for you loyal readers.

(note – the presentation isn’t visible in the feed if you’re reading via email/rss/facebook. You can also download the PDF from our SEM Presentations page.)

A summary of the Google AdWords Quality Score tips in the presentation:

• Improving your Quality Score will drive down your cost per click and ultimately your cost per acquisition/lead/sale
• You can’t succeed at AdWords unless your search terms (keywords) are grouped into many, very tightly aligned ad groups
• Your campaign settings are critical to AdWords success and will have a huge impact on your Quality Score – see slide 5 & 6 in the presentation for my tips
• Always be testing ad copy – I give specific advice about how to structure your ad copy testing (slide 7 & 8 )
• Keep your keyword list pruned – eliminate zero & low impression keywords that could be dragging your quality score down and add keywords that could improve your targeting & cost per click (slide 8 )
• If you aren’t using conversion tracking – you’re sucker. I also give tips on how to implement conversion tracking even if you can’t track “real” conversions (slide 9)

And – a few bonus AdWords management tips for you:

• Budget allocation: Optimize your impression share by fully funding the campaigns/ad groups that are giving you the best performance.
• Pay attention to the Geographic Performance Report and look for geographic areas (countries/regions/cities) where you get higher impressions/clicks/conversions and create separate campaigns for targeting those areas specifically. This can help you allocate budget to top performers (see below)
• Use AdWords Editor and make spreadsheets for campaign planning that you can import directly into AdWords editor. It will save you HOURS of campaign management time.

Got any other AdWords tips you’d like to share or ask us about? Comment below.