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Getting AdWords Ad QualityScore closer to “right”

My ads in my most recent campaigns had been suffering from issues of not being displayed. Googles pop up bubbles simply suggested improving the quality of the ad and/or raising my bid to improve my quality score. It took quite a bit of reading through Google’s documentation and a few outside sites before I figured out what I needed to raise my quality scores. Here is the nutshell version based on my personal low N dataset of experiments with AdWords. I hope this will save you some time and pain.

  • Make sure the keyword’s you’re trying to use are in the ad text somewhere.
    • If your keyword is ‘blue baloons’, make sure that that phrase shows up in your ad text.
  • Make sure the ad copy relates to the copy of the page you’re driving traffic to.
    • If you’re driving blue balloon traffic to a landing page that talks about red watermelons, you’ll get dinged.
  • Make sure you’re not overlapping keywords.
    • If you use a broad search for ‘blue balloon’ (no “s, ‘, etc) don’t then include a search for “blue balloon” (phrase) or [blue balloon] (exact match) as the broad search will include the others.
    • Similarly adding long tail keywords when you have a broad search that includes some of the terms in the long tail doesn’t seem to play nicely either.

I made the changes above to my own advertising efforts and am now landing a much higher ranking than I was before. Additionally all of my ads are now being shown.

Good luck and happy advertising.

-Karl