You're all aware many are effected by the low QS. In my case it's now 1/10 for practically every keyword / key term, and where it isn't I'm left with an option to bid really high to appear on the first page.
Strange. Our ad always appeared the first page for the last 3 months and pretty much right up the top. Now we don't appear at all.
I wrote to Google and was advised to follow the myriad of links I was sent.
We're quite shocked as it's a sudden drop of income for us given the landing page was generating solid sales for a genuine product of our own. Now we're without income, and at a loss at how to come to resolve this.
We have checked our landing page. It looks fine, content is unique, it's relevant and our page load time is faster than most server.
Any insight highly appreciated.
BTW, I don't know if I can be more specific so I've held back discussing dollar values, and other finer detail.
1. CTR - Look at both before and after you saw the drop in QS and compare. Were any changes made to bids, ad copy etc?
2. Ad Copy - Again, were any changes made? Are you using keywords (that would appear in bold) in your copy? Do these keywords also appear on the landing page? How many ads are you running in each ad group? You should always be testing 3 or so ad variations. Look at the top advertisers to see what they are including in their copy.
3. Ad Groups - How many keywords are in your ad groups? Are they all closely related? Too many keywords can actually hurt an ad group because the more you have, the less relevant they tend to get in terms of ad copy. Each of the keywords should appear in the ad copy somewhere and also on the landing page. This is especially true for high volume/high dollar keywords.
4. Bids - What were you bidding before and what are you bidding now? What are the minimum bids to get on page 1? Take an ad group that was affected by the new QS algo and increase bids to get page 1 results. Keep adjusting until you reach desired position. Update ads and improve CTR to gradually improve your QS. You may have to spend some money to get things back to where they were.
5. Google Analytics - Be sure your G Adwords account is synced up with G Analytics and look at bounce rates for your keywords and ads. High bounce rates are bad. Improve this and QS will improve.
Lastly, makes notes of all the changes you make. If you don't do this you will be clueless as to what is helping and what is not. Adwords Editor gives you a nice little place to make all your notes. Start with a small segment, test, improve, and work your way out to other ad groups. Don't make chagnes to your entire account at the same time. Once you figure out what is working you can attack larger segments at the same time.
1. I changed my max bid by a few cents prior, but had always regularly done this from the outset of using AdWords.
2. No copy changes prior, whatsoever. The ad is concisely written ad only promoting what's on the landing page - and same ad for over 3 months.
3. I had about 40, with many sitting on no impressions for some period. So really just a handful of good keywords.
4. Hypothetically speaking, let's say I usually bid more than a $1.50. Since this low QS score, it wants over 7 times that amount just to appear on the first page.
5. Have synced this yet.
It's really stressful. I'm just about ready to pull the pin on AdWords, or do I spend 7 times the amount to appear on the first page and potentially that for a single click. Ouch.
My commiserations, for I to have been there and so far nothing's helped improve the quality score.
Since when did this happen to you, out of curiousity?
There are several other posts about quality score issues. I would recommend using the search function and reading some of the other posts.
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