A business owner recently contacted us concerned because his Cost Per Clicks had doubled in the last month! His problem? Quality Score. He knew that it had been dropping, but didn’t know what to do to stop the pain.

So what do you do when quality score is sub-par? Here is a list of items to troubleshoot to make sure you’re doing everything right for your pay per click campaign:

1) Improve Click Through Rate In Ad Groups- Write some more ads and always test them. I always have at least two running and sometimes more if keyword popularity and traffic is high.

2) Improve Click Through Rate in The Account- CTR of the entire account will affect the quality score of every keyword in an account. We have made entirely new accounts at times when CTR was so bad for clients.

3) Add Negative Keywords- This is basically improving your CTR, but it also weeds out irrelevant searches.

4) Add Keywords to Your Ads- Matching the keywords from an adgroup to its ads improves the relevancy of the ads. Because Google bolds these words it usually improves CTR too.

5) Add Keywords to a Landing Page- Make sure your landing page is relevant to the keywords you’re advertising. Adding the keywords to a respective landing page will help.

BONUS TIP: Improve Your Click Through Rate More! I’ve read that historical CTR could factor up to 60% of a keywords quality score, while the next highest factor only counts for 10%.

We took on the client with the bad quality scores. After troubleshooting his account and making some changes we saw quality score improve for almost every keyword. With a little TLC you can improve your quality scores too!