The following article appeared in the August edition of .net magazine

Pay per click advertising is a lot like speed dating. You only get a few seconds to show off your best features before the other party moves on to a more attractive prospect. Worse still, being last in line means the best ones are usually already taken.

If your PPC advert isn’t coming out top in Google search results, a poor quality score is often to blame.

Fortunately, it’s a lot easier to improve your ad performance than it is to win back the hot blonde now sat at table two. As in dating, size is everything. PPC expert Daniel Jupp goes large…

1. Make Your Adverts Relevant Badly written advert text is a common cause of a low quality score. Omitting important keywords from the advert wording means you’re missing out on easy brownie points. Be as specific as possible. If you sell leather sofas and leather sofa is one of your keywords, use the same phrasing in your advert text. Making your advert relevant to your keywords will raise your quality score, giving you a better position within the search platform.

2. Get Tough On Keywords Although it’s tempting to squash as many terms as possible into your PPC advert, Google won’t thank you for raiding your old school thesaurus. Keywords receiving little or no clicks dilute the overall quality of your campaign and lower the click through rate. The search engines will punish a poor CTR with a low quality score, leaving your ad languishing in the lower reaches of its result pages. You’ll also end up paying more per click so it’s worth spending time getting this right. Move key terms which aren’t working into their own ad group or delete them altogether to improve performance. Selecting your top 10 keywords and directing the majority of your budget to them can also help bolster performance.

3. Keep Ad Groups Small When it comes to ad groups, bigger isn’t always better. Several smaller groupings are easier to manage than one large set of generic keywords and unrelated adverts. Keep each group precise – include only relevant terms and highly targeted adverts. Use your small ad groups to send each keyword to a relevant landing page as Google will check where clicks are being directed to. A less well endowed group may well enjoy greater success than a large general campaign, helping to maintain a positive quality score.