Want to rank above your number one competitor or decrease your cost per click? No matter your goal, improving the three components that make up your quality score is a great place to start optimizing your campaigns. But how do you do that?

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Start with these three components:

Expected Click-Through Rate

This is the percentage of people you expect to click your ad.

Helpful Hints:

• Set aggressive bids initially to ensure your ads are positioned in the top spots.
• Take advantage of ad extensions. Depending on your goals, there are multiple ad extensions you can utilize. Call extensions, callout extensions, sitelink extensions and structured snippet extensions are my favorites.
• Implement expanded text ads. Newly released to all advertisers on Google, expanded text ads allow you to include more copy than standard text ads and can lead to higher CTR.

Ad Relevance

This refers to the relevance of your text ad and what users are searching for.

Helpful Hints:

• Get to know your target audience. The better you know your target audience, the more likely you are to know exactly what they will be searching for.
• Create ad groups with a theme in mind so your ads correlate with your keywords. This allows you to use keywords in your ad headlines and ad copy.
• Include keywords in the display URL. The more keywords a user sees in the ad that appears after they search, the more likely they are to click it.

Landing Page Experience

Is your landing page relevant, transparent and easy to navigate?

Helpful Hints:

• Align keywords and ad copy with your landing page copy. This creates the best user experience.
• When using forms, be transparent with your privacy policy. Users are more likely to give information online when they know it will be protected.
• Make sure your landing page is mobile responsive. More than half of all Google searches occur on a mobile device. Meet your prospective students where they are.

Interested in learning more about expanded text ads? Check out Hayley Warack’s latest blog post.