One of the key objectives in participating in advertising is to pay less and get more. The better this ratio stacks up the happier the advertiser. Luckily, Google and the other online advertising sites make it possible to reduce the amount paid for advertising and get more benefit by paying attention to the quality and relevancy of the advert.

CTR compared to CPC

The snap shot above is the way my Google account stacked up over a particular six-day period. The top graph shows Click through rate (CTR) and the bottom graph shows Cost per click (CPC). The cost of a particular advert being clicked on has a few contributing factors and as outlined by Google they are.

• Ad Click through rate: about 60% – As users click on adverts so the CTR increases and the quality ratings of the adverts increase.
• Ad Relevance: about 30% – Determined by the correlation of the advert, the keywords being bid on.
• Landing Page Quality: about 10% – The information and user action when they arrive at the landing page being presented.

Looking a little deeper into my campaigns, I had the following breakdown. The top campaign is Content search; the others are all search advertising. It is quickly obvious again the correlation between CTR and cost from this breakdown. The second and sixth campaigns have much lower CTR than the campaigns around them and look what it does to the cost per click of these particular campaigns.

Ways to increase the quality score of adverts.

Break keywords into groups

Group all the keywords that belong together into a particular campaign. Go down to the next level which is the adgroup level and group the different concepts within the campaign into relevant groups. These groups may contain as few as one or two keywords. The idea is to get as specific as possible in targeting the keywords with the most relevant advert.

Target the keyword

Using the ability to change between broad, phrase and exact gives the ability to reduce the amount of noise surrounding an advert. The more exacting a keywords target is, the less the advert will be displayed for terms that are not related. Negative keywords play a role in minimizing irrelevant phrases that an advert may be displayed for.

An example of this would be if I am advertising, a caravan park and I target the city where the caravan park is found, then I may have my advert showing up for queries that are about the city council or library. Using the negative keyword library would stop an advert being displayed for search that is about the city library. What this means is that targeting more closely the intent of the person searching, means that the person who sees the advert is more likely to click on the advert.

Produce relevant landing pages.

If a person clicks on an advert because they believe that they are being taken to a place that sells hotel accommodation and they land on a page that sells cars then the user experience is lacking. This is a very out there example but the closer an advert is tailored to what is on the landing page the better the user experience and that leads to the possibility of having the user take the desired action. The correct correlation between intent and what is being displayed then helps to raise the quality score of the advert.

Online advertising is a full time job if done correctly. The size of the overall campaign also determines how much time needs to be spent in achieving the right result. If there is a struggle with time I would suggest that an advertiser cut done on the number of terms that are being targeted and concentrate on getting those campaigns which are running the best return. Aim to increase the CTR, by improving the quality of keyword relevance, advert and landing page. This in turn will lead to a decrease in the cost-per-click (CPC) of each advert and the overall cost of online advertising while providing greater return on investment.

3 Google ways to see advert data are
• Campaign statistics
• Ads Diagnostic Tool
• Analytics

Campaign Stats
A Google campaign can be tracked for effectiveness through the statistics that are accessed when looking at each campaign that is set up. The important metric in knowing if adverts are being shown is the ‘Impressions’. Impressions are the number of times your advert has been displayed over the date range set.

The date range can be set using the date range tool

To get a good idea of what is happening have a look at your campaign settings over a week and then a month and then three months.

Looking down the column for Impr which relates to impressions it can be seen that for each of the adgroups a certain amount of Impressions have occurred. If the Imperssion number starts dropping over time (change date range) then it can be stated that the number of times adverts are being displayed are decreasing.

Ad Diagnostic Tool

This tool gives the ability test if Google believes that there are adverts in the campaign that are relevant for a particular keyword. If Google finds an advert in the campaign it will display it here as follows.

Having Google identify a relevant advert does not mean that adverts in the campaign are being displayed as regularly as is intended. All it does is identify if Google believes that there is a relevant advert for that keyword. If there is no relevant advert for that keyword then this is the first area to address and create an advert that targets the keyword that is being aimed at.

Analytics
This tool is a separate tool provided by Google. It is free to sign up for, all that is needed is an Google account. Once signed up for an Analytic account with Google a piece of tracking code will be supplied. Place this tracking code at the bottom of each page that needs to be tracked. Some time will need to pass for statistics to be gathered, but there is a feature that helps identify how many times an advert is displayed for a certain keyword in a given advertising spot.

After logging in and under the tab ‘Traffic Sources’ and then ‘Adwords’ and then ‘Keyword Positions’ Google will be able to tell what positions adverts appeared in. Google don’t distinguish between which adverts as there will normally be a number of adverts attached to any one campaign. This information can be tracked through the campaign summary and looking at the ad variation tab.

From all of these sources of information it can be reasonably worked out if campaigns adverts are being displayed effectively. This will help in deciding how to better fine tune a Google adwords campaign, and it may be by improve the landing pages or by targeting keywords better by increasing the number of search terms or improving the content of the advert and of coarse the bit that Google likes, increasing the cost per click.