Here are some steps to increase your Quality Score:

1.)  Organize your campaigns and ad groups well.  Make sure your keywords within an ad group are related and relevant to your ads.

2.)  Use negative keywords to increase your CTR and decrease unqualified traffic.

3.)  Bid on your brand to increase CTR since your ad will most likely be relevant to those searching for your brand.

4.) Move underperforming keywords to their own ad group and write new ads for them.

5.) Manage your ad copy so that all ads in an ad group are closely related to the keywords in the ad group.

6.) Test destination URL’s to determine which ads produce the highest CTR.

7.) Test different ads to determine which produce the highest CTR.

8.) Make sure your landing page is relevant to your ad and keywords.

9.) Test different landing pages to determine which produces the highest CTR.

10.) Optimize your landing page, because Google also looks at landing page load time, navigation, links on the page, etc.

Increasing your Quality score is critical if you want to increase ad visibility and decrease your spend at the same time. The most important thing to remember is relevance.  Make sure your keywords, ad copy and landing pages are all relevant to each other.  This will increase both CTR and Quality Score and improve the success of your overall campaign.

Even Rotation

Pro: You have control of your ads and define “performance” how you choose.

Pro: You can fully test which ad variations for many factors besides CTR – also for conversion rate, ad text, landing page success and more.

Con: AdWords looks at CTR when determining Quality Score, and a higher Quality Score means better ad position and a lower CPC.

Optimize

Pro: Because AdWords does a great job showing the ads with the highest likelihood of being clicked, you can quickly tell which ad has the best CTR, rather than waiting to see results with even rotation.

Pro: Continually showing the ad with the highest CTR results in a higher Quality Score, which again, means better ad position and a lower CPC.

Con: You may end up spending money on ads that aren’t converting.

The common school of thought is to maintain full control of your ads and the ability to test them by choosing even rotation.  That said, you may choose to start your campaign on optimize to let Google tell you the ad with highest CTR quickly while improving quality score.  Then, with that information you can tweak ads, based on what worked while on the optimized setting, then switch to even rotation to fully test all ad variations.

First, conversions can be many things besides someone purchasing an item from a site.  You can choose an action you would like to count as a conversion, based on what is important to you.  For example, you can track purchases, form completion, or a certain page view as a conversion.  You can also track more than one of these types of conversions simultaneously.

With the 1-per-click method of tracking conversions, a user is only counted once within a 30 day period.  For example, if a user clicks on your ad, fills out a form and makes a purchase, it only counts as one conversion.  If that same user bookmarks your site, and returns the following week and makes another purchase, it does not count towards the 1-per-click conversion number.  So, within a 30 day window, all conversions one user makes only counts as one conversion.

With the many-per-click method of tracking conversions, every conversion a user makes is counted within a 30 day period.  Using the same example as above, if a user clicks on your ad, fills out a form on your site and makes a purchase, the many-per-click conversions would be two.  If that same user bookmarks your site, and returns the following week and makes another purchase, the number of many-per-click conversions would increase by one.  So, within a 30 day window, all the conversions that user made count, adding up to three many-to-click conversions.

If the number of many-per-click conversions seems too high to be true, it probably is.  There may be other things triggering this conversion, other than the ones you intended.  If a user refreshes the page or hits the back button to continue browsing your site after the conversion was completed, this may lead to an increase in the number of many-per-click conversions.  If a user bookmarks your converting page and returns to it within 30 days, this will also result in a conversion, although no purchase was actually made.  There are some ways to improve your code to prevent some of these issues, click here for more detailed information about how to do this.

If you are unsure about what you’re seeing, it’s always best to do a little research and look into Google Analytics to see if everything is matching up.

Search Engine Options
With AdWords, your PPC ads will show up on Google, AOL, Ask, and a few other small search engines, with Google far and away the largest. You can choose however, to show your ads on Google Search only if you choose. With adCenter, ads will show up on both Yahoo! and Bing, and you will not have control as to which search engine your ads appear.

Targeting Options
With AdWords, all targeting options are done at the campaign level. For example, enabling content, targeting time of day, changing bids by time of day or day or the week is all done at the campaign level. However, with adCenter you can choose these targeting options by ad groups.
And, with AdWords, you can only target geographical location, time of day and day of the week. But adCenter allows you to target all of those elements, as well as by gender and by age group.

Ad Types
AdWords allows for text, mobile, video, and image ads. With adCenter only text and mobile ads are available.

Ad Options
In AdWords, you can choose to rotate or optimize the ads within your campaign. adCenter will automatically optimize ads to show the ad with the highest CTR most frequently.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion
With AdWords you can use dynamic keyword insertion in the title of your ad. In adCenter, you can apply this to many more parts of the ads, including the title, the body of the ad and the destination URL based on search queries.

Dynamic Text
In adCenter, you have the ability to use placeholders to change many ads simultaneously. For example, many of your text ads for a hotel include rates that change frequently. Instead of changing each ad manually every time a new nightly special occurs, you can use a placeholder and update all ads at the same time. Click here for instructions on inserting dynamic text into your ads.

Copy Campaigns
You can automatically import your Google AdWords campaign into adCenter. Click here for step-by-step instructions.

adCenter Resources
Brand new information is available on the adCenter fall 2009 upgrade, including a tutorial and feature guide PDF for adCenter. Check out the Microsoft Advertising Community blog for all of this information.

Currently, the report only gathers data on a daily basis.  According to Google, reporting across multiple days would result in an under-representation of impressions. This is because there is a threshold on impressions in the reporting calculations.  But the number of clicks would be accurately counted, resulting in an inflated CTR.

However, due to the large amount of information being compiled in this report you cannot run a report for the current day.  Complete data for a given day isn’t available until 3 PM PST the following day.  To get the daily report for your campaign, wait until after 3 PM the following day and then choose the “Yesterday” option in the “Date Range” drop-down menu.  Click here for step-by-step instructions from Google on how to create the report.

Based on what you see in your report, you may want to separate your campaigns into several smaller campaigns, specifically targeted to different locations.  For example, if clicks from a certain location aren’t converting, you may want to create a specific campaign targeting that location and try a new tactic, or you may want to exclude areas that don’t convert altogether.  On the flip side, you may consider separating top performing locations into their own campaigns.  This way, you can create ads customized to that audience and direct more of your budget towards these higher converting locations.  This report allows you to breakdown your campaigns in a way that will help you fine-tune keywords and ads targeted to a specific location, while making the most of your budget in the locations you want to focus on.

CPA allows you to have a little more control of your advertising budget allowing you to only spend money on terms that are driving lucrative traffic to your site.  Since you only pay when certain actions are performed CPA is a low-risk advertising investment.  This allows you to have more control of you ROI (Return On Investment).

To meet your ROI objectives you need to have successful CPA bidding.  There are three ways to do this:

By Hand – Determine your CPA goal and raise and lower your bids in order to reach that goal.

Paid Tools & Service – There is an array of bid management services and tools that will help you meet your ROI goals by automating the bidding service and managing your bids.  This can save you time as well as help you to minimize conversion costs.

Google’s Free Tool – If your account qualifies Google has a free conversion optimization service that you can take advantage of.

Here are a few pros and cons associated with CPA (Cost Per Action) that should be considered before buying into a new advertising plan.

Pros:

-    As an advertiser you can be sure about your investment and ROI.  It is easy to see how effective the CPA is based on the money you are spending versus the money you are making.
-    Can avoid click fraud sometimes found in Pay Per Click advertising.

Cons:
-    You have to have an impressive website and site history in order to be eligible for CPA network membership.
-    You have to get traffic to the CPA offers.
-    It can be difficult to manage and requires good tracking technology.

If you are considering a change in your advertising campaign look at your goals and then consider giving CPA a try.

Retention/Advocacy

Creating ads for customers at the retention stage means creating reasons for repeat purchases. One way to encourage repeat purchases is advertising complimentary products. With the dog collars example, if a customer just bought a dog collar from your store, it would only make sense that they would be in the market for a dog leash shortly after. Your ad groups should be organized around the central themes of your keywords. Following this logic, you may have two separate ad groups for dog leashes, one for people interested in purchasing dog leashes and one for people who may have already purchased the dog collar. The bottom line is make sure that your ad messages are geared toward your different target markets. The advocacy stage is important for relationship marketing. Related to retention, the goal of ads is to continue to give a feeling of community to your customers. Promotions are a great way to continue having customers visit your website and hopefully refer their friends. Messages should be positive, reflect your brand image, and encourage customers to continue to frequent your site.

Erica is a Pay Per Click Account Manager for The Net Impact.

 Consideration/Purchase

The consideration stage occurs when the consumer is considering the purchase of a product or service. Consumers at this stage have done their research and are ready to determine if the purchase is worth it. It is at this time, that your ads should reflect valuable features and advantages that your product offers, using keywords such as “high quality dog collars.”

When consumers are in the purchase stage of the buying cycle, they know the exact product that they are looking for at that time. It is at this stage that keywords should be targeted directly to a specific product or action the consumer is going to take. For example, if a top seller is your 100% cotton dog collar; your keywords would reflect that search. Action keywords can be good performers as well. For instance, a keyword such as “buy cotton dog collars” can help to speed up the conversion process, appealing to those customers ready to buy. The landing page for this ad would take the consumer directly to the product page to make purchasing easy. Including the price in the text ad can be helpful as well, helping to weed out unqualified clicks from those unwilling to pay that price.

Awareness/Interest Stages

The awareness/interest stages in the buying process occur when the consumer identifies a need that he or she desires to fulfill. In order to meet this need, the buyer is going to gather information to determine the product or service that will best address his or her need. Consumers today are much more technically savvy, so it is likely that the internet is the first place they will go to gather information. With this in mind, it is important to have a pay per click message that will grab the consumers attention from the beginning. The message at this stage should be informational. Going with the dog collar example, a possible keyword at this stage would be dog collar, with a broad match. This will allow you to capture additional keywords that consumers are searching for at this stage, as well as help to ensure that your ad is more likely to show up.

Once they develop interest in the product or service you sell, they will look for further information on both the products and companies. It is important to give them as much information as possible at this stage as they will compare your company to your competitors. The ad’s landing page should provide the consumer with an overview of your products/services and their features. During this stage, consumers will begin evaluating the information they have gathered. They have information on their top companies and a list of criteria to judge them against.

One program that offers this type of advertising is Kontera. The company offers in-text advertising for advertisers, through a bidding platform similar to other pay per click advertising programs. The platform gives advertisers control over their keywords, bidding, and ad creative. In text ads are a great way to get your message and products out infront of potential customers at the exact time they are looking for information.

We will be testing out this new form of advertising on one of our sites. Over the next couple of months I will reveal more about our findings.