Optimize Mobile for Better AdWords Quality Scores

Chelsea — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:04:20 +0000

As mobile phones become more and more capable, they are quickly growing into the newest channel for people who want to surf the web. In less than 10 years, mobile phones have gone from having the most basic call features to becoming full-on smart phones with full web surfing and app capabilities. Google has been taking this into consideration, and last year started to limit AdWords on mobile sites that had flash heavy content; their reason being that hard to navigate mobile sites would not draw as much traffic.

So what does that mean for businesses that advertise on the web? Website functionality has become increasingly important for mobile devices as major websites continue to develop more advanced mobile platforms. In fact, a recent study conducted by Google showed that 61% of survey participants were unlikely to visit any website that they could not easily launch on their cell phones.

While this information may pose a challenge for traditional website publishers, it actually creates a lot of opportunities for advertisers. One Google product-marketing representative stated that each day more than 925,000 mobile devices are being purchased and used for the first time. Google representatives have also shared that searches made during the holiday season on the google.com mobile site were 300% higher in 2010 than they were in 2009. This research is leading many to believe that those numbers will grow exponentially higher still this holiday season.

With this knowledge, Google has decided to take advantage of that mobile device market by introducing a mobile site optimization tool for AdWords campaigns. Google is launching this effort in hopes of increasing search traffic on mobile platforms, and creating more opportunities for ROI with lower costs up front, for those optimized sites. With the help of these changes, Google hopes to provide mobile device users with a richer web surfing experience and advertisers with the chance to gain higher quality scores based on their mobile identity’s performance.

This means that going forward, AdWords users’ mobile landing sites will play a strong role in determining how their campaigns will perform on the entire network. From now on, the success or failure of a mobile site will directly affect a user’s entire AdWords campaign, even the part related to the main parent websites. The good news is this; there are simple ways to streamline the mobile web experience.

Every publisher should keep the following tips in mind when designing their mobile site. For starters, cut out the junk. Excess images should be avoided as well as flash imagery. Next, try to limit clicking by making the important information easy to reach, and the whole site should be easily navigable. Make sure that the landing page includes the most pertinent information since it is the first page that users will see. In addition to making the information easy to see, you should make sure that the site is functional for touch screens. It should be a finger-friendly site since many people will be accessing the site in this manner. You should also remember to test your site on an array of different mobile devices because what may look good on one screen, may not format correctly on another.

Of course, there are many other reasons to create a user-friendly mobile site experience. Though AdWords quality scores should be an incentive to design streamlined sites, website publishers should be looking to the future as more people begin to use their mobile phones and other devices to gain access to the Internet. Take the steps necessary to make sure you are reaching this valuable audience in the most efficient manner possible.

Need help optimizing for mobile? Contact a Site Pro Analyst at 602-314-3479 or info@siteproppc.com

AdWords Quality Score…. What is Relevance Anyway?

admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:30:14 +0000

Occasionally I can actually find time to work on my own AdWords campaign. And like everyone else I have to work with, in, and around the infamous Google AdWords quality score.

And like everyone else I come up with some real head scratchers occasionally. Here is a good example.

I have a FaceBook keyword campaign. In one of the ad groups, I bid on the keyword(s) — [facebook ad management]. So obviously I was disappointed and a little irritated when I saw that Google had determined that my quality score for that keyword was 2.

Hang in there, I promise this will get interesting in just a couple minutes.

Here is the basic information that I saw:

As any Google rep will tell you, the quality score is primarily influenced by CTR, but is also affected by ad copy, and website landing page. Since the CTR for this one was pretty good (11.11%)…the ad copy and the landing page must really be bad….well take my word for it, the ads were OK and in fact one of them actually had the terms FaceBook Ad Management in it, so we are probably not too far off there.

Normally when you get a 2 quality score something has to be really bad. So I slid my mouse over the little dialog box in the status column and got this typical message:

So the Google AdWords algorithm has determined that the relevance for that keyword is poor. It must be that the relevance for that keyword to my landing page is very poor….right? (Remember that the CTR was pretty high, so the ‘relevance’ to the searcher must be OK).

Here comes the head scratcher…..if you do a Google search on the exact term FaceBook Ad Management you will see that my site comes up high in the organic search results….in fact at the time I wrote this blog it was in the #2 spot.

Like I said, I am still scratching my head….if anyone has a good explanation, I would love to hear it!

SiteProPPC » AdWords Quality Scores

Optimize Mobile for Better AdWords Quality Scores

AdWords Quality Score…. What is Relevance Anyway?