Getting impressions and winning clicks on your website might continue to be a pain point especially for digital advertisers to generate attention and new business. And while advertisers can pay their way to the top (literally), why spend the maximum budget when there are alternative methods to get more clicks.

Increased ad visibility and a higher ROI from Google advertising can be as simple as improving ad relevance, aka keyword relevance. We are going to walk you through how this is done in this article. First, let us get familiar with what ad relevance is and how it can boost your website revenue.

• What is Ad Relevance?
• Why is Ad Relevance Important?
• How to Increase Ad Relevance on Google Ads
• 6 Simple Tips to Boost Ad Revenue from Website
• What are the three main Factors that Determine Ad Quality?
• How do I Improve my Google Ad Quality Score?

What is Ad Relevance?

Google defines relevance as how closely an ad campaign matches a user’s search, determined by the relationship between keywords, ads, and post-click landing page.

Read Also: Choosing the Right Monetization Partner

Ad relevance, or keyword relevance, refers explicitly to how closely your keywords relate to your ads.

For example, a Google search for “CRM for real estate” showed this ad:

The ad relevance here is strong because the search keywords are found directly in the ad headline.

Relevance and ad relevance go hand-in-hand because:

• Your keywords should always match your ads
• Your ads should always match the corresponding post-click landing page
• All of these things should always match a user’s search

What is Search Relevancy?

Search engines look for the content that provides the closest match with what the reader has submitted as a query. 

If the reader clicks away from the post that appears in the top search spots then search engines know that the content wasn’t relevant for that reader.  This is a simplification, but this is essentially one of the most important signals that search engines, like Google, measure to rank keywords.

If a reader stays on the content for a decent length of time and engages with it then the search engine knows it’s relevant.  Of course, it takes more than one single reader to give the search engines the idea that the content is or isn’t relevant, but that’s the concept. 

Relevance also has a bearing when it comes to engagement in the post.  It’s great, of course, for readers to spend a long time on your content, but if they engage with that content it can show even more relevance. By engagement, we mean, actions.  

This could be that they click on your email opt-in, it could be that they click on one of your affiliate links, or they engage or view an advertiser’s ad. There are a lot of potential actions.

The other aspect of relevance is the other content that you have on your site that supports what it was that the reader clicked on to read in the first place.  

If you have supporting content that is relevant, then it’s all going to work towards keeping your reader on your site for longer, encouraging more brand advertisers to see your site as a premium partner, while showing the search engines that your site as a whole is relevant for that particular content niche. 

Why is Ad Relevance Important?

In short, higher ad relevance = higher Quality Score = lower cost-per-click. On both Google and Bing, Quality Score is partly measured by relevance:

A low Quality Score means your ad, keywords, and post-click landing page are viewed as irrelevant, while a high Quality Score means that your ad, keywords, and landing page are relevant. (In addition to relevance, many other factors contribute to Quality Score, so it is possible to have a high Quality Score and low ad relevance, or vice versa.)

So what does having a higher Quality Score mean? Ultimately, it can mean a lower CPC.

This is because the Google Ads auction is partly based on relevance to encourage advertisers to create relevant ad campaigns (that’s what searchers want). A highly relevant ad with a high-Quality Score is generally granted a higher position on the results page. Naturally, this will earn you more clicks for the same budget — and a lower CPC.

The more relevant you are for a topic area, the higher in the search rankings you will appear and the longer your readers will stay on your site.  The more your readers trust your content, the more likely they are to buy from you or engage with your advertisers (i.e. trust your recommendations – or buy products from affiliates or products you create yourself or endorse).  

Think of it this way:  Say that you were to only write 10 blog posts, and in the first instance you write 10 about the top 10 things to do in 10 different cities across the world. If they’re well written they might get some good one-off traffic for each post.

If you write 10 blog blogs about a single city or area, then you’re much more likely to be seen as an expert and your opinion trusted about that city. This will help your readers see you as an expert in a way that they are more likely to interact with your site and return.

Relevancy should be important to you because it can drive traffic to your site, it can improve the trust that your readers have with you and it can make you more money.

How to Increase Ad Relevance on Google Ads

Now that we know what ad relevance is and why it is important, our next area of interest will be how we can increase ad relevance especially on Google Ads which happen to be one of the top website revenue sources. Below are some steps.

1. Create specific ad groups

Each ad group should focus on a distinct product or service because being specific is one way to be more relevant.

For instance, if you’re an all-in-one digital marketing solution that offers a variety of advertising tools, you should create a different ad group for each of those tools — one for email marketing, one for content marketing, etc.

Salesforce does this with their campaigns. This Bing ad highlights the company as an email marketing solution, specifically:

This is important because if someone is searching for an email marketing solution, they’re more likely to click this ad, instead of a generic irrelevant ad.

2. Select keywords carefully

Include keywords that directly relate to the precise theme of your ad group and post-click landing page, plus close variants of those keywords. As a guideline, include about 5-20 keywords per ad group.

Keep in mind, it’s often more practical to bid on long-tail keywords, rather than single words because leads visiting your page from long-tail searches tend to be more qualified. For instance, if you’re a social media marketing company promoting your new scheduling feature, use a long-tail phrase such as “social media marketing scheduling tool” instead of “social media marketing.”

You may receive fewer impressions and traffic from longer phrases, but the quality will be higher because your offer is more relevant to what they’re looking for.

3. Include keywords in your ad text

When people see their search terms in ad text, it shows them the ad is relevant to their search. Therefore, it’s best practice to include top keywords in your ad text — especially in the headline and one of the description lines.

In this example, one of Zoho’s main longtails might be “sales analytics software,” so it’s included in both the headline and description.

Adding a keyword to the display URL (like Zoho did with “analytics”) is another way to include keywords in your ad text and increase relevance.

4. Keep ads simple, yet compelling

Rather than overwhelming viewers with an abundance of copy, highlight the unique characteristics of your product or service that make it stand out from the competition.

Then add a strong CTA with personalized copy that encourages users to click, and tells them exactly what they’ll be doing post-click. “Get the Ebook Today” is more persuasive than “Download.”

5. Send traffic to a relevant post-click landing page

Remember, relevance is partly dependent upon landing page relevance — which means your ad’s content must match your post-ad click landing page content.

In addition to implementing a message match between your ad and landing page, be sure to design pages specific for each ad group. Also ensure your page delivers what the ad promised, includes top keywords, and excludes missing keywords.

6. Test multiple ads

Experiment with different offers, keywords, ad copy, etc. to see what performs best for your advertising goals. Google Ads helps with this by automatically rotating ads within an ad group to continuously show the best performing ads.

Reviewing your ad performance and A/B testing your campaigns regularly can help you figure out the best ways to keep your ads relevant and achieve your marketing goals.

6 Simple Tips to Boost Ad Revenue from Website

Some publishers believe that increasing the visitor traffic is the only sure-fire way to increase ad revenue from their blogs or websites. While increased traffic generally does mean more ad revenue, the publishers are still leaving a lot of potential ad money on the table.

For those who want to make the maximum revenue with traffic being constant, I’ll talk about an exciting concept today – Ad Revenue Optimization. Optimization is an  act, process, or methodology of making something as fully perfect, functional, or effective as possible.

In short, it means to squeeze that last drop of potential ad revenue from your advertising network – be it Google Adsense or any other CPC/CPC/CPA based ad network or exchange.

Let us look at some techniques which can boost ad revenue of your website, without any changes to the traffic.

1. Try Different Ad Locations or Placements

Testing different ad locations for every ad unit tops the checklist list when you are trying to increase CTR (Click through rate) for your ad units. Some common practices include:

• Placing the ad above the fold
• Integrating it with your site’s content
• Placing it near your call to action

Take an example of placing an ad unit near call to action. If your website is offering file/software downloads to your users, your CTA (Call to action) is the file/software download button and placing ads near this button can help.  

But make sure you do not confuse users between the actual download button and the advertisement (which a lot of websites do on purpose) to ensure a good user experience for your website. There is always a very thin line here as it is possible to increase the ads CTR but only at the cost of user experience.

Such gains are temporary and over a longer-term, as users stop coming back to your site, the overall traffic declines and so does your ad revenue.

Subtle changes relating to the ad location can take you a long way. So, create variations and keep testing.

2. Experiment With Sizes

It never hurts to try different ad sizes and compare with the ones you currently use. Got a 250×250? Try comparing it with 336×280 ad unit. Using a wide skyscraper, test it against a normal skyscraper. The rule of thumb is a larger unit increases the CTR, but I’ve seen otherwise too.

A very good example would be to remove the 728×90 Leaderboard from the header (you can move it to the footer too) and replace it with the 728×15 link unit offered by Adsense. This was tried on a couple of sites that got the majority of their traffic from search engines and was able to see the CTR increase by 15-20% and the overall user experience improved as well since the ads got smaller.

(Although do keep in mind that CTR increase for a link unit will not always mean an increase in revenue – because link units only lead the user to further targeted ads – and the monetization follows only after a subsequent ad click)

Couple the different ad sizes with different locations/placements and you have endless options. Remove your skyscraper from the side columns and replace it with a leaderboard in the footer to see what that does.

Test crazy! You would be surprised to see how such changes reflect on your ad revenues. The trick is “Continuous optimization and tweaking” to improve and optimize website ad revenue.

3. Compare Ad Networks

It doesn’t take a genius to understand how important it is to use the best ad network. The reason is simple – some networks pay more while some pay less. But that’s not the only point. The quality and relevance of advertisements are also important. You may have placed the ads in the best possible location and in the most striking size.

But, what if the ad is not relevant to what your website user actually needs and what if the ad is not designed well? (like not having a clear call to action). Although it is quite impractical (and also not possible in many networks) for a publisher/webmaster to track the CTR of each ad creative and screen ads on this basis, but over a period of time the network quality and relevance would speak through the CTR or eCPM (effective CPM).

It’s not necessary that only a large or well-known network gives you access to more relevant and high paying advertisers. Sometimes, a smaller network made specifically your vertical (think Insurance Ad-Network) can and should do better.

So, if you test different ad networks with the ad size and position being constant for a unit, you can actually measure and see which network is performing better (in terms of total income CTR & eCPM) over time.

4. Ad Types & Ad Designs

Have you tried comparing the CTR of an image ad with a text ad? Or, are you using the default color style on your Google Adsense Text ads? For some websites, fewer users clicked on Image Ads than the text ads (text ads were aesthetically better). You can even manage to increase the conversion by 43% without changing the ad size or position. How to do it? Make sure only text ads were shown and create a contrasting color theme for these text ads in relation to the website’s colors. The contrasting theme will really help in highlighting the ads.

For some sites, ad units blending in with the colors of the website  have also increased CTR, specially when the ads are placed within the main content.

5. CPC vs CPM

Many large publishers don’t even talk about CPC. They just want a fixed cost for impressions delivered and why not? CPM has proved to incur more returns over a period of time for large publishers. So let’s say, if CPC gives a revenue of $x on an average, CPM ads might enable your website to earn $1.2x or maybe more (hypothetically).

But wait, what if you are able to increase your CTR using the techniques mentioned above? It could be fairly easy to get more revenue than CPM or, maybe not. But what I’m asking you do here is to test and not assume anything. Keeping your gut out of the way is very important when it comes to testing.

Let me put it in a better way, use your gut only to create testing ideas, after that, leave the judgment on the stats. Your stats should speak for you. Your website can be better off with CPM ads or CPC can alternately help you earn more revenue. The only way to know for sure is through testing.

6. Continuous Optimization

Contrary to what people think, testing is not one time but an ongoing process. The test should never stop, especially when it comes to ad revenue optimization in order to constantly measure visitor behavior on your website and act before the trend changes. The best tools to see how your viewers are interacting with your site are heat-maps, scroll-maps and click-maps.

Your site, no matter how good the design is, will develop blind spots, sooner or later. It is always nice to keep an eye on these blind spots and make sure your ads do not develop one, around them. One common thing which we noticed with many popular websites (especially blogs and forums) is that returning visitors tend to ignore the advertisement on your website, and more so on every consecutive visit.

Well, then a good way to keep your CTR high should be to constantly change ad positions on your website. This is also a reason why many websites see Ad CTR sky-rocketing, right after a design change.

Although, making such changes very frequently has its own issues and takes its toll on user experience, but a webmaster can easily strike a balance here. We feel that once in 4-6 months should be fine enough to keep the users happy and ensure CTRs remain good too.

What are the three main Factors that Determine Ad Quality?

Having a high Quality Score is crucial when it comes to maximizing AdWords performance. However, it’s been very difficult to work with Quality Score in the past, as Google has not easily allowed you to diagnose all of the factors that comprise Quality Score at scale.

Quality Score, along with your bid and ad extension data, is how Google determines your Ad Rank. Quality Score is the second-largest component of Ad Rank, with only your bid being more important.

When you raise your Quality Score, you can expect one of the following to happen:

• Your costs-per-click (CPCs) decrease.
• Your average position increases.
• Your CPCs decrease, and your average position increases.

It is also possible to see your average position increase and your average CPC increase, as you’re now beating a different company in the auction, and thus your actual CPC can vary. Overall, when you can’t raise your bid but you want to raise your average position, then you need to increase your Quality Scores.

The Quality Score factors

There are many different and relevant that affect a quality score. They are listed below and explained in more detail in the following paragraph: 

• How relevant keywords are to your ad group
• Click Through Rate (CTR)
• The quality of your landing page
• Relevance of text in your ad
• User experience
• Your historical performance

Together, these factors determine your score, and can also help you to understand what you need to do differently to get more traffic and clicks on your website. Think of this score as similar to a credit score. You must take into consideration your history of AdWords performance, among many other factors.

Having the right keywords are very important to increase your quality score. It is measured by how relevant the keywords you use are to your ad group. An ad group is a set of keywords that are shared by an advertisement.

This is how people find your website or product. Another factor that affects your score is Click Through Rate (CTR). This rate is measured based off how often an ad is clicked on per the number of impressions.

Another important factor that is put into consideration of your quality score is the quality of your landing page and user experience. Together, the relevance of keywords, CTR, the relevance of text in your adds plus your landing page performance and user experience are what make up your quality score.

There is not much information as to what factors are worth each part of the score, but they are all important to how you are scored. One of the most important components is the click-through rate (CTR). This factor shows whether or not your ads are relevant to Google searches.

How do I Improve my Google Ad Quality Score?

Increasing your quality score on Google AdWords is not just good for bragging rights. It can also be helpful to increase your pay per click profits and the position your site or blog shows up in advertising. Increasing your score can be an indication that your ad or website is doing well.

Without the score, you might not know some of your current features are hurting you rather than helping you. In the long run, it can also save you time and money in making sure you are using the right keywords. 

The AdWords quality score will tell you the measurement of aspects like the quality of your user experience, the relevancy of keywords, and how your pay per click advertising campaign is performing. Now that you understand what your quality score is and why it is important, you can begin to work on the factors that affect your score. 

1. The First Step is Knowing the Factors

By reading the above information, you have already taken the first step into increasing your quality score in Google Adwords. Just as you must understand the factors that affect your credit score in order to improve it, it is the same when it comes to your quality score.

The first thing you need to do is understand what the factors are that affect your score. These factors are not all created equal, but it is also not clear as to what percentage of your score each factor is.

This is why is very important for you to know all the factors. It is not just one or two factors that you need to work on to increase your score. You should work a little bit towards each of these factors, so that you can see an increase.

Once you know what it is you need to look out for, you can begin to make changes towards raising your score. There is no way your score will be increased without first understanding the factors that affect it.

2. Improve Your Score by Targeting Your Ad Groups

Your score will be improved if you design your ad groups into more targeted campaigns. This will help you to heighten the importance between searching and the actual ad. When you start to set up your campaigns, use as many different ad groups as you need to, as long as they are relevant to the keywords being used.

If they are not relevant, don’t use them just to use them. If you only have a couple of ad groups using the same keywords, this will not make your ads relevant to your users because it will be difficult to find the specific ad they are looking for.

Each group of ads should have its own set of relevant keywords. This is the only way that you are going to be able to effectively target groups that you are interested in. Ensure that keywords being used are logical and match what the ad groups might be looking for.

There are tools you can use to figure out what keywords are most relevant to your ad groups. By targeting your ad groups with specific keywords, you can work towards improving your quality score.

3. Research Keywords

Before using your keywords, you should know how they are performing in the grand scheme of things. As with anything, it is a good idea to research what you do before you do it. Keywords are one of the most important aspects that affect your quality score.

When a user types words into a search box, the words that they use will determine whether or not your site or ad will pop up. There are so many keywords out there. It is not just about the words themselves, but the combinations used when being searched are just as important.

When you are picking which keywords to use, the research can tell you what keywords are being used, how important they are to users, and what opportunities they have to really pull in traffic to your website.

4. Write AdWords Ads That Are High Quality

As with any type of writing, words that are well written are more likely to draw customers in. Without high-quality ads, you may not get the results you want. What is a high-quality ad? A high-quality ad will focus on one product or service so that you can really draw in the type of crowd that you want.

Ads that are scattered offer more than one product and are not as effective. Customers want to feel as though they are really and truly getting what they want and need from your ad.

When the ad is scattered and includes too many components, it will actually drive your customers away. Ads that are neat and tidy will have more of an impact. By writing AdWords ads that are higher quality, you will be able to increase your quality score.

5. Work on Your Landing Page

You might not realize how important your landing page is to visitors, but if you think about it, it is quite often the first page that people see. If your landing page is not in good condition, is not easy to use, and is confusing to your visitors, then your quality score will be lower. Think about how important your landing page is.

This is why it is important to consider using an analytics site to run statistics on your landing page. Some to consider are Google Page Speed Insights and Google Mobile-Friendly test.

By figuring out your score on your landing page, your development team will be able to determine what needs to be done in order to make improvements and therefore raise your quality score.

You should also consider making sure your landing page has relevant keywords. This is sure to get more users interested in your content. For each ad group, you may want to consider having important keywords that are unique.

While it may not be possible to design a landing page for every single ad group that you have, you can increase your overall score, as well as user engagement this way. The happier your visitors are when they view your ad, the more likely it is that they will become customers. 

Another important aspect of your landing page to keep in mind is making sure you decrease the time it takes to load. This can be crucial to making sure visitors stay on your page until it is fully loaded. When a landing page takes too long to download, your visitors may consider going elsewhere.

6. Make Your Ad Groups Small

There are times when size does matter. In this case, it matters if you are making your ad groups smaller than others. While it is usually recommended to use 15-20 different keywords per ad group, this is not always the best advice to take.

This won’t help your quality score. It can be extremely difficult to run an ad that has between 15 and 20 relevant keywords. You may find that it is difficult to run one ad that is relevant to multiple search terms. Strategists and researchers have suggested that using between 1 and 10 keywords per group is more beneficial than using 15-20.

While those two pieces of advice might seem like they are very far away from each other, this is an actual way that you can improve your quality score. If you think about the name of the rating, “Quality Score”, you can remember that it is about the quality of your keywords, not the quantity of how many keywords you have. The smaller the ad groups, the better off your score will be.

7. Try Using Negative Keywords

The interesting part of this piece of advice is it isn’t what you would expect. You might even be asking what negative keywords are. Negative keywords are ones that you include in your ad groups that actually prevent your ad from showing up. This sounds counterproductive.

Here you are figuring that the keywords you are using are helping you to gain visitors when, in fact, they are turning people away from your site. When the negative words are used to search, your ad is not going to show up to the searchers.

So, why are we discussing this when we are supposed to be figuring out how to increase your score? This is because negative keywords can actually be beneficial in some way. You can use keywords to make sure that people who are not in your target ad group are not finding your ad.

Surprisingly, this will increase your click-through rate. This is because when people are clicking on your ad, you don’t just want them to click it because it has shown up since this is probably not what they are looking for. You want people to click on your add because it is relevant and that is what they are looking for. By using negative keywords, you can actually increase your quality score.

8. Expand Your Text Ads

Expanded text ads are a feature that allows you to run an add with longer copy, or words. Having the use of 50% more characters can be beneficial to increasing your quality score. One of the greatest features of expanding text ads is that you can use long tail keywords. This can be very beneficial to your ad groups.

Read Also: How to Optimize your Ad Network Numbers

You get more space for search terms that are longer than normal. This means it makes it simpler for people to find you. By using long tail keywords, you will be able to boost the relevance of your ad. When you boost the relevance of your ad, you are also increasing your quality score.  

9. Avoid Using Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Google AdWords has a feature called dynamic keyword insertion. While some may benefit from using this particular feature, you should not use it when looking to increase your quality score. Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) is a tool that will enable you to put a user’s search term exactly how they have typed it into your own ad copy.

While, ad first, this seems like it would be something that is beneficial, you will find that it can really cause a decrease in your quality score.

This type of keyword insertion can also make others think your message is not written well. This will cause your marketing to fail to do its job. The best way to handle this is to make sure you know what words are being used in your ad copy.

Another consideration is that if you are already using limited keyword ad groups, then you do not need to use Dynamic Keyword Insertion.

Finally

As we have seen from this article, creating ads is one thing, making them relevant is another. However, if you want to boost your website revenue, you should make sure that your ads are relevant. We have provided a lot of tips above on how you can make your ads relevant. It is time for you to put in the work needed.