I have recently been reading the book “Your Game Plan for Success” by Joe Teixeria. The book is about Pay-Per-Click marketing strategies. Pay-Per-Click is still a heavily used tool of Internet marketers and thus is something that anyone marketing online should become good at.
One of the Things from Chapter 3 of the book that I was not aware of was the Quality Score. It makes sense that factors like click through rates, landing page quality and other performance items would affect this quality score and I like that performance is a factor, however I did find it interesting that “Account History” was a major factor in calculating ones score. I guess one way to look at account history would be to compare it to frequent flyer miles with an airline, the more you use it the more discounts one can get. Loyalty programs are a good way to build a brand, however account history in this instant seems more like taking care of friends over the new guy. It really comes down to the simple fact that if you want to do Pay-Per-Click marketing with Google you need to have a good Quality Score to get the best pricing so you do what ever you can to build your score.
Other ways to improve your quality score include, have targeted marketing goals, target ads and testing for best click through rates but organizing your AdWords account is one of the over most overlooked things to do to build your score. The better you organize your campaign by topic, the more targeted your campaign and that builds your score. Also, most people seem to overlook this task thus creating room for better performance vs. the competition.
The chapter also talked about Key Word Types such as “ Board Match”, “ Phrase Match” and “Exact Match”. It also talked about the debate of which type of keyword is the best. To me this seem like a silly thing to debate about. I mean, why put all your eggs in one keyword type basket when you never know which one will be the one to get the all important conversation? Pay-Per-Click is like any other investment–the more you can diversify, the better your odds at having stable growth. It is important to understand keyword types and know when to use all of them to achieve the desired ROI.
These were just a few of the things I learned from just that one chapter. If you are looking to build traffic to your website then this book is a great way to learn the basics of PPC and AdWords for Google.
Your Google Game Plan for Success : Increasing Your Web Presence with Google AdWords, Analytics and Website Optimizer
Author: Teixeira, Joe
Date: 2010
http://www.amazon.com/Your-Google-Game-Plan-Success/dp/0470641649