Supersize Your CTR and Quality Score on Brand New PPC Campaigns

Paid Media / August 21, 2009

Launching a new PPC campaign? Here’s a way you can quickly boost your CTR and Quality Score initially while keeping traffic as targeted as possible and not blowing the bank. Don’t include any broad match keywords in your adgroups when you start. Focus on phrase and exact match only. This will help you keep your initial bids down since the traffic should be much more targeted and relevant, both in the eyes of your visitor and Google.

10/10 Quality Scores and Double Digit CTRs

We’ve experimented with this strategy on a number of new campaign launches in the last few months with astonishingly positive results. The quality score across most, if not all keywords tends to be anywhere from 7/10 to 10/10. And in several cases CTRs have held steady in the double digits for a relatively good amount of traffic.

Maintaining a solid CTR is critical to keeping your quality score high and CPC low and this is especially true when a campaign is new and has no history. Once you have some momentum built up, you can slowly begin introducing some broad match keywords to gain incremental traffic, but keep a close eye on the search query report to make sure that you filter out any irrelevant search queries through the use of negative keywords. I recommend checking this at least once a week for campaigns with larger amounts of traffic and at least once a month for smaller campaigns.

Expanded Broad Match – Or Almost Anything Goes

Google has been known to open up the floodgates in campaigns containing broad match keywords through their expanded broad match feature to the misfortune of unsuspecting advertisers. That said you’d be surprised (not pleasantly) to see what kind of queries some of your ads are showing up for because of this. All the more reason to watch the search query report like a hawk once you’ve got some broad match keywords in your campaign.

If you’re using Google analytics you can take things one step further and set up a custom filter to see the actual search queries that your campaign is triggering ads to appear on. Jason Billingsley has put together a really simple tutorial on how to do this on the Get Elastic blog.

Let me know how this tactic works out for you.