QS story

Google AdWords quality score story

[smallcompany]

Last week I aimed to improve QS for a keyword that was the only one in an ad group. The reason for that was that quite big campaign has been moved from $CAD based to a new $US based account. At the beginning, we've suffered a lot, now it looks better, still not as good as it was.
In old account (with long history) the keyword in question had QS of Great and minimum bid of $0.05 CAD. In new account it was OK and much higher until recently when it dropped to $0.10 US and QS of OK.
So I “listened” to what Google’s magnifying glass said under its keyword analysis and created one new ad, having three in total at that moment.

The news… in about day or bit longer, QS went to Great and minimum bid to $0.05.

At the same time, the new ad was performing on position #4 while the two old ones were on #2. The new ad was forced to be served for around 50% while the other two took around 25% each. The final score was an average position of 4.1 and low CTR (compared to previous time with two old ads).
I talked to a specialist and she confirmed that there was no any kind of hold on newly created ad, meaning it was good to go into prime result area where the highest CTR occurs (positions 1-3). Still, it was at #4.

I decided to pause the new ad so we could go back to our regular CTR.

The news… QS went back to OK and minimum bid of $0.10

Now, who (or what) is wrong here? Should we give it another chance and be patient?

This is the second time I experience that the AdWords system “says” one thing and real result proves the opposite one.

Our other QS story is here:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[tomasvdb]

Yup, experienced something similar, very frustrating.

we have some keyword/adcopy combinations that have more than 50% CTR (although at low volumes) yet they have much higher minCPCs (and avgCPCs) than more generic adcopy.

you can't capture creativity in an algorithm (yet :)