On reviewing a few ad groups I noticed some irrelevant traffic and removed the broad match term as it seemed to be the only one that would bring that traffic.
Google Keyword tool suggested this keyword as being highly relevant, yet adwords deemed it to be poor.
Is it a case of google displaying the ad to irrelevant people and then lowering the QS as a result... as those people obviously will not be interested in the site content.
I have noticed that QS has dropped for a lot of terms when Google has displayed the ad on totally irrelevant sites (despite my best efforts to have it appear on only relevant sites in the content network).
I also clicked on one referral url from google.com search and found nothing... Your search - keyword - did not match any documents and there were no ads displayed. So how could I get a visitor?
It seems the more I try and do things how google suggest, the more it costs me. It has got to the point where it is almost delivering no ROI and it is by following google advice.
As far as the QS dropping when Google shows the ads on irrelevant sites, that's probably not related, because QS for Search and Content are calculated differently - you might consider breaking your Content out from your Search campaigns. Everything about them is completely different, so the strategies for each should be different too.
The referral url from Google search - that happens to me all the time; those urls are too dynamic to always be reproducible.
As far as the QS dropping when Google shows the ads on irrelevant sites, that's probably not related, because QS for Search and Content are calculated differently - you might consider breaking your Content out from your Search campaigns. Everything about them is completely different, so the strategies for each should be different too.
I had search and content on different campaigns, but it doesn't matter what I have done since the last QS update... all I know is the traffic I am getting now has changed dramatically in the sense that it seems to be comin from keywords that do not appear in any of my keyword groups... when I am using exact and phrase match only.
Even after reducing most of the ad groups to virtually 1 or 2 keywords, I now get much less targeted traffic - and get clicks for keywords that I am not targeting... yet there is no increase in invalid clicks. I had to remove any broad match keywords due to the totally irrelevant traffic that started arriving after the update in mid-september.
