Have you ever encountered keywords whose bids are already high but having only a few ad impressions when promoting SEM campaign? As soon as you visit the search engine, you can't locate your ad even after turning several pages. The low quality of your ad's keywords is most likely the key impact of your ad’s quality and performance when bidding price are already higher than industrial average.

What is keyword quality? Why does it affect the performance of the ad? We will now explain the mystery of keyword quality in detail for you.

Question 1: What is keyword quality? Why is it so important?

Keyword quality is a comprehensive evaluation of keywords, creativity, landing page quality, and other dimensions by the advertising system, reflecting the recognition level of viewers of your search ads.

The above formula serves for ranking the competitiveness of SEM ads. The formula shows that the quality of keywords shall affect the competitiveness of advertising. After initial adding of keywords, the system will accumulate the data for a certain period to calculate the quality. If the bidding price remains unchanged, the higher the keyword quality, the higher the advertising competitiveness, and the more likely it is to obtain a better ad position at a lower price. Besides, Baidu adverting platform also provides tools to query the quality of keywords, which is very intuitive and convenient for improving promotion efficiency.

Question 2: How does the system judge the quality of keywords?

Keyword quality is made up of three factors:

• Expected click-through rate (CTR): The possibility of users clicking the ad after watching it.

• Relevance to keyword: The relevance of keywords to the creative title, description, etc., of the ad.

• User experience: Relevance of keywords and the landing page’s content, and also the user experience of the landing page.

The system will use a scale of 1-10 to indicate keywords’ quality and compare the above three items with the industry average to score.

The detailed score can be viewed through the advertising platform:

Question 3: What if the keyword quality is lower than the industry level (6 points)?

When the keyword quality score is below 6, it indicates that at least one factor is below the industry average. There are generally three directions to optimize the prompts of the system:

(1) Estimated CTR is lower than average

• Meaning: Users are less likely to click on your ad than the industry average.

• Cause: The probability of users clicking after watching your ad is not high. The system determines the expected CTR based on the historical CTR performance of similar ads.

• Optimization ideas:

(a) Add new keywords that are highly relevant to the business.

(b) Remove or suspend ads and keywords with poor performance or low relevance.

(c) Highlight the distinctive advantages of products and optimize creative and landing pages for keywords to improve the matching.

(d) Use call-to-action words to encourage users to click on the ad, such as try it now, get it for free, etc.

(2) Creative relevance is below average

• Meaning: The relevance and creative quality between the keywords, ideas, and netizens' search intent are lower than the industry average.

• Cause: When users see the ad, they feel that its content is not related to their search intent, usually caused by the weak correlation between keywords and creative content.

• Optimization ideas:

(a) Improve the relevance of keywords and ad titles and descriptions, accurately express products / services to netizens, and highlight the advantages.

(b) Test multiple ideas with different selling points, delete and revise the ideas with poor effect.

(c) You can use creative tools like optimization center to find creative suggestions.

(3) The landing page experience is below average

• Meaning: After the user clicks on the ad, the landing page’s user experience and content relevancy are lower than the industry average.

• Cause: The landing page’s content has a low correlation with keywords and ideas. The user experience after reaching the landing page is not good, resulting in a poor advertising experience.

• Optimization ideas:

(a) Improve the relevance of keywords and the landing page’s content to ensure that netizens who search for the keyword can quickly obtain the required information or services on the landing page.

(b) Ensure that the landing page's loading speed is smooth enough and understand how users read to improve the user experience.

For more information on keywords optimization, contact our digital media consultant at: enquiry@so360.hk.