Improving your ad relevancy can have a positive impact on your account by increasing your quality scores which in turn will allow you to attain higher positions for your ads or allow you to reduce your CPCs.
Recently I’ve been spending some time looking at how best to assess your quality scores to benchmark them over time as well as looking at the best way to action your insights. A key area has been around developing an effective ad copy strategy to maximise your quality scores which I will start discussing today but plan to write a series of articles focusing on ad improvements.
Ad groups will usually comprise of closely knit keywords; for instance, an ad group for low cost blue widgets may contain keywords similar to:
- Low cost blue widgets
- Cheap blue widgets
- Bargain blue widgets
- Affordable blue widgets
When dealing with large accounts with hundreds or even thousands of ad groups, it is not uncommon for the ad copy to be focused around the name of the ad group – in this example “low cost blue widgets” would be the primary term included in copy. The difficulty with this is that whilst you’ll have a high keyword relevancy for your primary keyword, your other synonyms (cheap bargain and affordable) may have lower relevancy and lower expected CTRs due to the ads not including the exact terms being searched for.
When building your ad sets you should consider what keywords are in the ad groups and ensure that you build ad variations to cater for each of your high volume keywords in the ad groups. For phrase and broad matched keywords it’s also important to assess your search terms and make sure key search terms also have relevant ads and where necessary search terms are split into their own ad groups as needed.
The best scenario is to create up to 4 or 5 ad variations in each ad group that work effectively together to maximise your performance and the relevancy of your ads to your keywords. Make sure when taking this approach to ensure your ads are optimising for performance so the best ads are shown for each of your keywords. If you’re looking for a lower effort alternative, dynamic keyword insertion is a way to ensure your ads cater to your different keywords but has the drawback of providing less control in terms of your ads and additionally will provide less insights when reviewing your copy. It’s also important with DKI to be careful of competitor and mis-spelt terms as these can also be pulled into the ads.
Building all these additional variations of copy may sound like hard work, but this can have a significant positive impact on your ROI and is worth the time. If you’re interested in this approach I also plan writing an article on how to ad test this approach in the near future, so watch out for that!