Its been nearly 2 years since I created or modified any adwords campaigns and I needed to finally do it today. Unfortunately, it seems any and every keyword (I literally submitted even garbage keywords like dasjdkasjdkjsaka) is getting penalized somehow that Adwords is asking me to bid $10.00/click. These aren't competitive keywords either, low volume (< 10 searches/month), only 0-2 other bidders, tried broad/exact/phrase matches, all same results.
I'm pretty familiar with adwords, I'm picking relevant keywords, my landing pages all have unique content, full page reviews of the product i'm selling, keywords in the adgroups match those on the landing pages, etc. I'm baffled as to what else I can do to get a reasonable click minimum?
Contacting support yields the usual form mail response, links to optimization and tips pages which I've read inside and out.
I even setup a brand new adwords account hoping that it was my ctr history that was holding me down, but even that yielded the same results. I'm really stumped and have no idea what else I can do.
Can anyone provide suggestions?
Thank you kindly.
You need to get a fresh pair of eyes on your site, your ads and your keywords.
Are ALL of your keywords Poor QS, or just some of them?
If you are a new campaign, with new keywords that have virtually no competition, Google doesn't know anything about you. So you are pretty much ALWAYS going to get very high minimum bids, until they learn about your site, your keywords, and you establish some history. If you were adding this campaign to an existing account that you'd been keeping up - there is also an account QS, and that's what they use to give you the benefit of the doubt while they're evaluating the new campaign. But if you don't have, then you get socked.
It's going to take at least a couple weeks to several months for your campaigns to settle down. After you make changes, it could be a week before Google notices them. Once the account has been running for longer, that time will shorten.
I would take one or two of your keywords that are most important, and run them at the minimum. Control the cost by the daily budget. If your ads are good and your site is good, you should see them start to come down, then you can add more, as you gain history.
I didn't know the QS could improve on inactive keywords.
Yep, it can. If AdWords doesn't have any information on your account or your campaign or your keywords, it takes a while to establish, and meanwhile, you go all $10. The same new campaign that I started and just left at my own bids is now running merrily along with all great and ok quality scores, and most bids under .25.
When I was in more of a hurry, I just set ONE bid high, and left all the others inactive. I let it run only a couple clicks a day, and it was probably 3 to 5 days before things started coming down.
The other thing that seems to be hyper important lately is to have the "theme" kw of the adroup in the ad text. Dynamic insertion doesn't work much for this anymore and there's also some talk of dynamic insertion actually giving you a lower QS. I guess the theory being that you're too lazy to write a unique ad for each KW so the quality must be low.
If that doesn't lower my bid rate, I'll go insane.
Patience young jedi... ;)
I know it sucks to hear that but give it some time.
make all your changes but put them on a new domain..
We both got nailed on June 10th and we're both doing fine now..
In the same account, bidding the same price on the exact same KWs with the same ads to these sites gets remarkably different QS. The US site almost always gets great and good and the UK one almost exclusively gets poor. That doesn't make sense. No matter what I do I can't get a good QS on the UK site. Maybe it's just cursed and I need to try another domain.
The other arbitrary thing that gets me is that if I have 50 kws pointing to the same landing page 10 will get a poor QS and a $10 min bid and 40 will get great and a $0.04 bid. The thing is that I'm using dynamic insertion on the landing page so that theoretically they should all be the same.
Or other things that are weird is like bidding on these kws:
blue widget
red widget
green widget
purple widget
arbitrarily one or two will get a bad QS. It doesn't make sense, since they all have a custom landing page and the only difference is the <blue> might be replaced with <red>. Seems the same difference to me. But obviously not to G. Confusing.
Brizad, I don't suppose you happen to find any solution to that did you?
It appears that Google does not have a problem with the long tail, but it doesn't want to waste resources helping advertisers go after the long, long, long tail.
Try to use some keywords that are getting at least 30+ searches a month. If this is successful, you may be able to add in some of those lower volume keywords later on.
Despite all the changes to my adcopies/landing pages I'm still getting $10/click for all my keywords, other than a new domain I'm really out of ideas here.
It's been three days since you entered this item. I don't know when you made all your changes, but that's much too soon to expect a response.
On a brand new campaign with new keywords, I tell my clients not to expect decent results for a month. At minimum.
My Google rep told me there was nothing I could do, and £5.00 was the price I had to pay. He told me to focus on improving the quality score, but also agreed he couldn't see how I could make it more relevant.
I left the keywords with a max bid of £0.10 and a week or so later, QS went from poor to great, minimum bid dropped to £0.02 and all the kewords were active.
Just confirming that 7-10 days of doing nothing can sort out the QS and minimum bid (and that Google should tell people this is a possibility)
On the other hand my other websites with 'great' QS sees continous fluctuation on a weekly basis..
So I conclude that some domains are 'cursed' - 'flagged' and have No hope.
In such a case, ..change domain. But wait for 15 days to a month before doing so.
With adWords, it is NOW a lot about patience.
I never thought I'd have to do so much SEO work behind a PPC business model!
