Quality Score problem on new account - help!

[limitup]

I have a site I've been advertising primarily on adwords for a year now. My account is highly optimized, literally every keyword has a great quality score, etc.

We launched a new site yesterday. It's in the same niche, but a completely separate company and site. To start off with I basically migrated our existing adwords account over to a new account for the new site.

Problem is that something wacky is going on today - CTRs for all my main keywords are less than 25% of normal. Even for the established site/account. Someone must be doing some major scraping, etc. today for this niche, or something.

Combined with the fact that I messed up and started the new account with a handful of crappy ads (I *thought* they were decent) and the end result is that all of my money keywords in this new account have horrendous CTRs and the account is off to a very bad start.

All the keywords have quality scores of OK. The minimum bids are OK, but I know this is having a seriously negative affect on positioning because I'm bidding TWICE as much as I'm bidding in the other account, and I'm still having a hard time even getting my ads in the new account to show now.

What is my best course of action from here? I know it's not the landing page because it is better than the landing page for the existing site in every way.

Should I create a new account and start over?

Should I jack up my bids even more to try to get my ads shown near the top and bump up my CTRS and just suck it up for a few days as I lose major $$$?

Should I write a borderline "deceptive" ad that will get a ton of clicks, and then change it back to something else once my CTRs are higher?

What else can I or should I do?

Google's QS system is such a joke!

[smallcompany]

There have already been some discussion here about this issue (QS). It’s simply that AdWords is a bit different animal then you would expect. After having Google for so many years in PPC, it seems that new accounts are out of luck, at least at the beginning.

First thing I found is that approval takes longer than before. If you are aiming top positions, you’ll be on a side for a while, unless you ask for approval. You have a rep?

Secondly, yes, you’ll be paying way more, I mean so more that it looks ridiculous.

Recently I “moved” few accounts from $CAD to $US. Pay attention now, same sites, same keywords, same ads – this means lots of AdWords’ history should be preserved as the system looks into overall performance of certain keywords, ads, sites, etc – then your own stuff comes into place, that’s how your keywords get their mark like Great, OK, or Poor right after you’ve entered them.

Brand new site – holly, if they have no clue about it, it’s like they don’t trust it, just like in organic stuff, you are nowhere.

That’s why you pay more, and still have a headache.

Please note that all of my comment comes based on what I “felt” through managing many AdWords accounts.

Just yesterday it happened I called about one of my new accounts that was in the “black” after I migrated well established campaign. I would run it, then pause it, and swing back to old account that performed well. I did it few times with no luck to see my ads where I was expecting them to be (including one call about week or so ago that ended with “I’ll send you an email by the end of the day to confirm your new ads were reviewed”).
So I called again (yesterday) and asked same thing. I’ve got so mad after that I took Professional exam and passed it with >91%.

Long story short, if established site, ads, and keywords have a hard time to get through, you can expect new sites to have it even harder.

I totally disagree with that but it looks to be what it is.

[Green_Grass]

Yes, New accounts are out of luck. Pay a lot more and wait for upto two months for some history to build up, and bids will come down a bit. This is the new adWords.

[limitup]

Smallcompany, what exactly do you mean by approval? You said:

"First thing I found is that approval takes longer than before. If you are aiming top positions, you’ll be on a side for a while, unless you ask for approval. You have a rep? "

Are you saying ads have to be manually approved before they will see a good quality score and/or be able to reach top positions?

[limitup]

I actually just thought of something that might be an issue here. On this new site I have lots of great content, but since the site is brand new I just realized that most of the content hasn't been spidered yet so Google doesn't even know about it. This would surely reduce my landing pages quality score, and I didn't even think of this.

If this is the case, it seems like a general "best practice" when setting up a new adwords account for a new site is to first wait until all of your content pages are spidered and in Google.

[smallcompany]

In regards of approval, my comment was right if you were aiming top area, right below search query filed. No ad can go there unless it was approved, manually or automatically, does not matter.
It may happen that ads do not get approved automatically so it takes some time to get through manual review.
If your aim was below position 3, my comment may not be applicable.

I would agree with you that brand new site should wait a bit before going onto AdWords. Not sure how much the two bots talk though.

[tomasvdb]

I'm convinced the page rank of a site is very important in determining QS. So if you launch a new site, even if it is extremely relevant, it will take a long time before you get a good quality score. In the mean time, all you can do is continue improving your site with SEO best practices.

[Insomniak]

Ive heard a theory about placing AdSense on your site to speed up spidering as that bot needs to know what contextual ads to show right away. Might help here.