Until now, the order in which your ad appeared depended on how much money you were willing to pay for it. But that is no longer the case, as of the beginning of December.
Google has introduced a “quality factor” into the algorithm that ranks the results and ultimately decides which ads appear first, second, third, etc. And it has done so to prevent people who do not have certain products and content from buying keywords and directing traffic to their website as if they did. (For example: buying keywords that correspond to products from their competitors).
Although some SEOs are already beginning to fear that the process of ranking ads published through AdWords will end up being as opaque as the ranking of search results, we share Google's opinion that this is a good thing for all advertisers and also for those who click on the ads.
What is the “quality factor”?
As always happens with things that work well, there are those who abuse them to get more profit than the rest. This has been happening with Google Adwords and now Google wants to put an end to it.
Google wants to make sure that the page you are directed to after clicking on one of the ads is about what you are searching for.
So from now on, if the content of a page has nothing to do with what the user was searching for on Google, the ad on that page will appear in last position.
How to be in the top positions of ads, without having to pay more for it?
Well, it's clear... maximize the number of times that the words you've hired ads for appear in the text of the page the ad points to.
And of course, make the page your ad takes you to (landing page) different for each keyword. You can easily do this from the AdWords menu.
For example:
A user searches on Google for “fireproof safe”
You have a company that manufactures security products and sells fireproof safes and you have contracted Adwords so that when someone searches for “alarms”, “safe”, “safety deposit boxes”, etc. your ad appears on the right side of Google.
Until now, the best advice that could be given in this case was to have 2 ads, one for alarms and one for safes. With this, you make the decision to click on one of your ads higher, since the ad speaks to what the user is looking for.
- “alarms” -> alarm announcement
- “safe” -> advertisement for safe deposit boxes
With the change in the algorithm, in addition to selecting an ad for each type of search, you have to select the page to which the ad will direct you.
It is not useful to redirect them to your main page (as the Adwords system does by default), since you will almost certainly have a specific page for that product within your pages and on it, the searched word will be more relevant (it will be written many more times).
This is also good for you because if the user goes directly to a page that includes the content they were looking for, they will be much more willing to fill out forms requesting information about the product or send you an email asking about it.
If you don't have a specific page for each type of product that matches the keywords you've contracted with Google, then you should create them, or your ad will never appear in the top positions.
Tips to get the most out of your Google Adwords:
- Buy only the words that your target audience will search for on Google.
- Create landing pages that contain your keywords.
- Test more than one ad and invest in the one that converts the most.
- Focus your budget on the keywords that get the most conversions.
