Old Account vs. New Account

Anyone have any experience?

[bw3ttt]

My account is very old and I've tried a lot of experiments that resulted in a low CTR account wide history. 1.13% to be exact with uber billion impressions. Last weekend I really screwed up and averaged only 0.86% CTR account wide and all of my 8/10 and 9/10 QS keywords dropped down to 5/10 and have slowly rebounded to 6/10 and 7/10 after shutting off the low CTR campaigns.

My current campaigns average 5.05%, but I can't seem to get many 8/10 QS or higher even though I'm doign affiliate marketing for authority sites. I'm wondering if it would be better to simply start over with a new account and transplant only my campaigns with extremely high CTR?

Are new accounts heavily penalized? I'm wondering if it would be better to just to stay where I am with my old account. I feel as if my current account is stained with something I'll bever be able to overcome, 5 years of low CTR.

[smallcompany]

Most of people struggle with that (new accounts). It looks like you can’t replace the history.

Usually, new account will have even worse performance than the old one.

Still, nothing stops you to experiment.

[bw3ttt]

I went ahead and started a new account and despite having an account CTR of 16.35% I have noticed no change in impressions when compared to my old account. They also have me capped at $50/day despite being a pre-funded account.

So far it seems that my low historical CTR + old age account is better than my high CTR + young age account.

[MadeWillis]

Losing your history really is a bad thing. You should be able to control your CTR, given you will have to pay some higher CPC's to regain lower CPC's and better QS. Higher CTR's will improve your QS.

With that in mind and if you've got the budget, I'd recommend increasing bids slowly, campaign by campaign, and see if you can improve QS before messing with a fresh account. Don't increase every campaign at once because if it does not work, you will just waste money.

The most important thing to remember is what you did to kill your QS in the first place, so that it doesn't happen again. Remember to use your keywords in your ad copy and display URL's to help with the relevancy factor.

Are new accounts heavily penalized?

I wouldn't say it's a penalty, but again, history is a very important factor in your QS.

If you do continue with a new account, I'd also recommend playing in top positions to get higher CTR's and quickly gain a good QS. Reduce bids once QS is at desired levels.

[bw3ttt]

Reading around the site I see that I'm not the only one with odd QS fluxuations since the last QS "improvements" were made. The fluxuations seem to be random.

[MadeWillis]

Yes, the most recent QS update was a pretty big one. Some factors are now calculated on the fly. Check out the Adwords blog for more details of the update.

[edited by: MadeWillis at 7:25 pm (utc) on Oct. 6, 2008]