We find that gaining high quality scores is similar to search engine optimization tactics from 1999. Like early search engine optimization, quality score is largely based on keyword density, but the density in this case is not created on a single page. Instead, it follows a keyword on your landing page through the URL to the ad text and back to the keyword that triggers that page.

So if you want a great quality score, you need a tightly themed Adgroup with a small list of keywords. You then need to write ads that feature these keywords, so they get bolded on the search results pages and generate a high click-through rate. It’s also best if these same keywords are placed in the URL, headline, and title tag of the landing page and are featured in the ad copy of the page. We call this “keyword siloing.”

It also helps if your landing page has some valuable content or links to content. Pure “squeeze pages” with no content (just lead forms and a picture) are being penalized by Google. Google states on their Site Quality Guidelines page: “Try to provide information without requiring

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So how do we go about targeting your campaign and avoiding overly broad, expanded-match keywords? We generate an extensive negative keyword list to run against your broad-match keywords. To build a great negative keyword list, we first work off a generic list of negatives that work across many campaign categories. Words such as free, career, jobs, courses, etc. are often good negative keywords.

To find more negative keywords that are unique to your market, we will run a “search query report” from your AdWords campaign and get a partial list of queries that triggered your ads. We will see if there are any keywords we want to block. We also use special javascript code to pull out the actual search queries in your Google Analytics reports, but the real skill of using negatives is in knowing how to apply them to your account.

The matrix below shows exactly how Google treats negative broad, phrase, and exact-match keywords against a variety of search queries. Study this chart carefully to make sure you are using these match types properly. (Click on the chart to enlarge)

What this chart does

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If you want to do some homework on your own to improve your Internet marketing campaign, we recommend you check out MarketingSherpa.com and MarketingExperiments.com. In fact, if you go to these sites and subscribe to their newsletters, you will likely find some ideas right away that will generate instant improvements in your campaign. For search engine optimization news, trends, and advice, there are dozens of blogs and sites that provide a wealth of information. One of our favorite sites is Sphinn.com. This site is modeled on the Digg.com social bookmarking platform. You will see articles on this site posted and ranked by the very top experts in the search marketing field.

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Below Are the First Items We Check When We Analyze a Prospective Client’s Marketing Campaign.

Quality Score Problems:

• You are using keywords that are too broad, and this is killing your quality score and conversion rates.
• Your Adgroups have too many unrelated keywords, and the ads are not relevant.
• Your landing pages do not have important keywords on them, or they are not specific enough for your Adgroups.
• You have no negative keywords, and you don’t use phrase and exact-match keywords enough.

Campaign Setting Errors:

• You are day parting based on your office hours and are missing out on great sales that come in after hours.
• You have the search network turned on, and you are in a B2B market.
• You are inadvertently rationing your ads with standard distribution instead of accelerated distribution.
• You have the content network turned on, and you have never run a site-performance report to block bad sites that do not convert.
• You never split your content ad prices to even out your conversion costs.
• Your campaign budget is set too low, and your keyword bids are too high. You are not engaging the algorithm to “pull” your ads to optimize your click costs.

Geo-targeting Errors:

• Your geo-targeting is set to show your ads

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In Search Engine Watch, on Dec 3rd, 2007, David Szetela wrote a fantastic article on a topic I rarely see talked about for SEM: “How Google, Yahoo Content Ad Matching Really Works.” Not only does content matching work, but it can also help you find great partner sites to advertise on.

Here are the highlights:

1. Run your content campaigns separately from your search campaigns.
2. Separate content campaigns into small ad groups, each with ideally 20 to 40 keywords and never more than 50.
3. Don’t bother using different match types, e.g. phrase and exact match in Google. Match type is ignored by the content matching algorithms.
4. Don’t bother with separate bid prices for each keyword. These too are ignored, and the search engines operate based on the ad group’s default bid. Use negative keywords to help the algorithms “figure out” sub-categories of content network site pages where your ads should not appear.
5. Create ads and keyword lists that, taken together, will match a particular theme or category.

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Like most things in life, the answer to this question is: “It depends.” We are a top-notch “boutique” management company that only uses intelligent and creative campaign managers. Most campaigns are handled and/or supervised by the principles. What this means to our customers is that we can more than cover the cost of our services by increasing the return on your ad dollars. It is not unusual for us to be able to lower cost-per-conversion rates (the net amount you pay for a sale or lead) by more than 20% in the first few months of management.

Our customers find that not only are they getting greatly increased results from the same advertising investments, but they are also in a position to increase marketing and realize an increase in sales.

The fact is the AdWords management is not only very complicated and time consuming, but the algorithms used by the major search engines are constantly changing. Unless you have someone on your side making sure that your ad dollars are being well spent, you will waste advertising money on less-than-optimal campaigns and end up losing business to your competitors.

There are many AdWords management companies. We have found a niche by providing

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