Now many keywords seem to be ok (6-7 out of 10)
When I check the details and recommendations, I get a message that says:
What should I do?
Keep it up! Your keyword, ad text, and landing page quality are high. Continue to track your keyword and ad, however, as performance data can change regularly.Keyword Relevance
No problems found.
Landing Page
No problems found.
Landing Page Load Time
No problems found.
Load time is faster than the average in your server's geographic region.
So then what is the problem? How do I go back to great?
I am concerned because I don't want the QS to keep sliding.
TIA
Sara
It would be great if someone from Google would jump into one of these threads to shed some light.
The conspiracy theory seems to be that it's to do with ebays return but I think it's more likely just teething problems with the new system. It would be great to have a really open announcement if that is the case.
Try that, be patient (don’t change every day or every few hours), and see what happens.
So I'm wondering whether I should change my ads or not. Wouldn't want to do any testing when QS displays are unreliable.
What do you think?
I think things are still settling out with the new QS reporting.
Are your ads still showing up in a reasonable position? Are you converting? Is your ROI good? If so, don't worry about it.
As far as testing ads - that's always a good idea in my opinion. Don't delete the ones you have - either pause them, or run them in tandem with the new ones.
Thanks so much for your comments.
I'm seeing a lot of ads high up in the results that don't have the keyword mentioned at all.
I haven't done any experiments yet because I think Google is currently having a temper tantrum or something and will cry itself out soon enough.
to much power under 1 roof. Let's hope it will come to its senses
I have some keywords. They are very nichy, not much competition, and very well matched to the ad so I get a pretty good CTR.
Because the ads also tell you EXACTLY what is on the other end of the click, they get really great conversion rates too.
Unfortunately these words are now labeled Poor. Many of them also say that you need to pay X amount of dollars to get on page 1.
The truth is there is little competition for them so they appear in the top 3 or 4. And they appear a lot.
If you read the previous few paragraphs carefully maybe you'll agree with me. It must be some kind of a glitch because it's illogical on so many levels.
If there was no visible QS showing and you didn't know your keywords had been labelled poor, you wouldn't know there was a problem. So maybe there isn't? Just a glitch that will clear itself. I really hope so, I just don't like seeing good CTR converting keywords with very clear user experience explained in the ad being labelled poor.
A question to other people who have seen strange and sudden drops from Great to OK. How much has it affected your traffic, conversions etc?
I hope they will get back to normal. I think there is a glitch.
These are just quick and casual observations looking at a couple of campaigns, nothing scientific.
I really haven't seen any change in traffic on my account as a whole.
I'm getting sick and tired of having to spend so much time fiddling daily with AdWords - I'm now budgeting my time and looking elsewhere to make money. The 'support' has been weak and sometimes they are clearly dishonest. $200.000 spent with these wackos. I am not a criminal or dishonest - and I don't like being treated as such.
In summary, I think the effort to make things clearer has made them confusing.
On the positive, I would have to say that Googles actual results do improve and improve. They have definitely learned how to deliver ads in a way that naturally improves conversions (I have really found cpa to be useful) and the content network is way better than years ago.
I guess the secret is just to ignore the QS for the time being and concentrate on conversions and bottom line. I think most people know in their heart of hearts if the keywords are a good or bad fit for the ad and landing page. And conversions confirm that.
[edited by: engine at 8:55 pm (utc) on Oct. 8, 2008]
[edit reason] no specifics, thanks [/edit]
If you have an ad that works for you and is making you a lot of money Google may tell you that they will raise your cost if you don't fix it the way they want it. It is just stupid to have the same set of rules for every market. Every market is different. Google is going to one day realize that they can't automate everything. They have already figured this out in organic. They have an army of people going over the results now days.
The only reason Google does ppc the way they do is so they can charge anything they want. They make it so complicated that they can just raise prices and disguise it as an upgrade to the system. The system is way too complicated for no reason other than a way to hide charges.If you have an ad that works for you and is making you a lot of money Google may tell you that they will raise your cost if you don't fix it the way they want it. It is just stupid to have the same set of rules for every market. Every market is different. Google is going to one day realize that they can't automate everything. They have already figured this out in organic. They have an army of people going over the results now days.
Well said. Nothing but to agree with you.
They already brought it to the point of having advertisers (Google’s clients) being paranoid about QS and noting else. Nobody talks about business, prospects, buyers, industries, products, locations, and who knows what else anymore.
Suddenly it turns that QS is our priority... Like QS has become equal to our business success... Like Google AdWords can set the standard of what is good or bad in overall.
You know, in some cultures people celebrate when someone dies, in other they cry.
It’s really a paradox that a company cashes in no matter if it does it right or wrong (Google). Average CPC has never gone down during this PPC journey. Does this mean that no single site got their QS into a better shape?
It’s like now we have Yahoo thinking about how they could improve their QS. Give me a break...
Did anyone test Google’s QS lately? Try your keywords and ads and point them to some Google’s (related) page. ;)
The majority of accounts have tightly focused keyword lists, ad text, and custom landing pages and a 2 to 7% CTR.
One excellent performing account went from consistently in a 6 month period of 80 lead conversions per month to only 20 for the month of September. So far in 9 days they have had one Google conversion and 6 Yahoo conversions.
I see this as a grab for money from Google. We have advertisers that are taking 1/3 of their Google dollars and moving in a stronger position into Yahoo. With Yahoo we are still getting conversions and cost is nearly 2/3 of what we are now paying on Google.
I am having to spend an incredible amount of time on client accounts to try to stabilize them, just to look each day and see more keywords which are targeted move to "poor".
Google really needs to get a handle on this, this is impacting well set up, performing accounts with capricious results.
Some impact certainly in results is from the economy, but we can balance that from results we are seeing on Yahoo versus AdWords. Used to be the other way around.
Well that is what they said, but what they really meant was:
QS will now change regularly and you will continually have to tweak your ads, keywords or landing pages and spend an excessive amount of time micro-managing them to achieve a similar ROI. The easy alternative is to increase your bids to the price we want so that we can make more money.
QS = BS
The big problem is that it isn't bringing better results because people have to spend so much more time managing their adwords accounts.
It seems Google are trying to gain more money during the peak times by throwing up the highest paying ads and then flicking the switch back to older ads that generated clicks for them to try and ensure overall daily revenue increases.
The timing of the change has also been bad due to the global financial situation... when everyone is trying to watch their spending, Google updated their QS which has led to more uncertainty and distrust.
There is another system update planned for the 11th - will it revert anything back? Or will it ensure more profit for Google? Or will it finally make it worthwhile investing more on alternative PPC platforms?
At any rate, good news on your new ad, syoung.
Suddenly it turns that QS is our priority... Like QS has become equal to our business success... Like Google AdWords can set the standard of what is good or bad in overall.
I have to admit that QS has been more of a main focus nowadays when managing campaigns. We manage multiple client campaigns and QS is extremely important in all of them - much more than it used to be.
I definitely agree with you guys who are saying that you can have an ad that's performing well ROI-wise but not so well CTR-wise and be penalized for this. I can understand Google's point of view in terms of wanting to improve quality but isn't a higher ROI also a sign of giving people what they want?
Sometimes your CTR will be lower simply because you've filtered out some traffic by displaying pricing in your ads so the "tire-kickers" most likely will not click resulting in a lower CTR, but a potentially higher conversion rate. How is this bad for quality and user experience?
I also agree that you can't automate the improvement of quality and while it might be the most cost effective way to do it, they will tend to frustrate both advertisers and users. Just think of search re-targeting where Google tries to automatically determine which ads to show based on a previous search query. Or how about expanded broad match - now how did that move ever increase quality?
I'm not about to become a Google-basher, on the contrary, but it would really be nice to see some more transparency on their part. Also collecting feedback from the search community before implementing radical changes and updates wouldn't hurt either.
