High Traffic Relevant Keyword, High CTR, Low Quality Score

[jam2005]

I was wondering if any of you have any ideas of how to deal with a situation.

We sell products associated with widgets and the word widget is in the name of the product. We want to bid on the keywords [widget], [widgets], "widget", and "widgets".

The keywords widget and widgets get a lot of traffic and there are only two advertisers (our company and Yahoo!) bidding on these keywords.

Our landing page sells widgets and even provide them for free, the ad has widget in the title & the description, and we have about a 7% CTR on the keyword.

AdWords shows that with a 7% CTR, the keyword has a poor quality score and the system wants $1.00 to continue to bid on the keyword. Considering the fact that we could possibly get thousands of clicks each day, this doesn't really make sense.

I'm assuming that the reason no one else bids on these keywords is because they have the same problem.

Does anyone have any experience in bidding on high traffic keywords that are relevant to your product/site with a high CTR but a low quality score?

I hope that make some sense. :)

[momotan]

It's pretty simple. Look at it from a big picture point of view. Big G takes an average of the CTR and price for all #1 ranked ads across the board. So let's say the ever popular and competitive "widget hosting" has a CTR 12% and the top price is around $10.00. Now we move on to "widget dating" and that one has a top price of $3.00 and a CTR of around 15% for #1. Then we get into super popular keywords like "widget". Using broad matching, under normal circumstances this would be one that is very popular. However, the natural CTR for it because it is so general is around 7%. That doesn't match up to the overall average. However they will let you offset that by bidding higher. However, it isn't possible to get positive ROI by bidding higher, so advertisers don't bother and what happens is that the system basically creates a black hole for that keyword. I am not sure if G realizes that they are losing large amounts of revenue because of the way the system works or if they have factored in the cost of serving up those ads at that high volume and it's not worth it for them at certain CTR/price levels.

[jam2005]

Interesting. Does it really cost Google anything to serve an ad? If they let us bid $0.50 on the keyword each day, they could potentially make a couple hundred dollars off us each day on those four keywords alone. At $1.00 they make nothing and no one advertises at all. I don't see how it makes business sense to create these black holes.

[netmeg]

How long has your campaign been running?

[jam2005]

Since 2001. We've been bidding on these keywords this entire time.

[netmeg]

Have you broken them out into their own Campaign and Ad Group? Did your minimum just go up recently?

[exmoorbeast]

You are thinking along the right lines but I don't think Google invested in all that semantic technology for nothing. They understand that different verticals have different CTRs, and that in my opinion is not where the QS penalty is coming from. I give their QS bot more credit than that!

[jam2005]

The keywords are in their own ad groups and campaigns. We've been having these problems for a few years - although the problems have changed as Google changed its scoring.

I've tried out different ads and different landing pages, always with the same result. Every once in a while the ad will stay active for a few weeks without the minimum bid changing. Then one day it will jump up to $1.00.

We usually just create a new campaign when it reaches $1.00, but you can't build up any history if you are doing this constantly.

[netmeg]

At this point, I'd probably contact them and see if I could get some help.