I started a campaign that didn't go over so well. I was in a learning curve at the time but have since honed my skills at writing ad copy, picking keywords and bidding. The problem is that the campaigns and keywords that I first started with developed a negative quality score. Now, with my landing page changed, new ads, better bidding, my keywords have the original negative quality score hanging over them that I can't seem to shake.
The kind folks at Adwords suggested I just bid up past the minimum for a while and the matter would correct itself. I did, but the adwords engine kept increasing my minimum, 0.40, 0.50, 1.00, 5.00. I acutally paid over $1 per click for quite a while just to rank position 3 or 4 on keywords that should be going for $0.55 in position 1.
For my ad positioning my recent click-through rates were good but that short term performance couldn't overcome my previous history. The previous history wasn't that significant, but Adwords wouldn't seem to let it go in spite of the the recent performance. It was as if my account had a negative flag associated with it for those keywords and no matter what I do I'm not getting a second chance. Eventually I had to quit when minimum bids of $5 and $10 per click were assigned to my key words.
I approached the Adwords people about it and they gave me lots of nice links to their help pages that talk about quality score and landing page and ad text and everything else. By all accounts we've done everything, exactly how the help files suggest.
Pursuing it further, the Adwords people suggested it was our landing page. Fine, a few weeks and a few thousand dollars later a new landing page was born. Well, that didn't make one bit of difference. (I don't think the adwords engine really checks landing page quality anyway though that's another topic entirely.)
Eventually we tried a new domain under the same account to no avail as well. The Adwords folks tell me that your keyword stats are tied to your account so changing domains doesn't help.
So, is there any way out of this quality score hell?
Also your landing pages are readable by a bot right? Once we had really bad quality score and couldnt figure why cause the keyword - ad - landing page copy combination was great. After a little more investigation we realised that the pages were all built in frames and could not be read by a bot.
We unfortunately couldnt re-do our pages but changed our strategy on adwords, which helped us hit our targets.
1. Keyword relevance
2. Ad copy relevance
3. Landing page relevance
4. Click through rate (CTR)
5. Keyword performance history
6. Other relevance terms Google will not share
If you are absolutely sure you have optimized your pay per click ads so factors 1-4 are at their best, then you may have to create another account if you do not want to wait on the change in quality score. Before you dump your account and take on all the work of recreating them, have someone take a look at your improvements. This can help you on your existing account or when you create your new one. If you want more help in improving your quality score, check this out.
[edited by: jatar_k at 3:29 pm (utc) on June 5, 2007]
[edit reason] no urls thanks [/edit]
netmeg's right!
don't get another account, that avoids the issue, doesn't prevent recurrence and leads to new troubles.
That's not much help if you got the matching absolutely right first time, but often one doesn't. It might be an idea to revisit this issue.
Also, at the risk of stating the obvious, if someone else is working on exactly the same keywords as you, that would explain a lot. The reason they're called bids is that the process is an auction - you up your bids and the others up theirs.
