1. The keywords are had very high competition, with mostly big branded companies bidding for them.
2. The highly competitive keywords also targeted a small and specific region e.g. Bay Area only.
3. The entire site did not have any mention of the keywords.
4. A pretty poor Quality Score.
5. Too many keywords in the same ad group.
The measures I took which generally helped me were -
1. Create a landing page optimized for the particular keyword (and relating keywords).
2. Segregate them from the ad groups and create a separate group for each of their own clusters.
3. The above two measures should ideally improve the Quality Score and help to reduce the bid.
4. If possible or feasible, I'd rather say, target a larger region.
These have generally solved my problem till now, but a little more insight would be very helpful.
Sounds like you have a major quality score issue - also known as being "Google slapped". Make sure you have the quality score column visible in your account and then use the keyword analysis tool (magnifying glass) next to your keywords to gain further insights into where the problems lie.
It could be a problem with the way your account is structured. Ie. Selection and organization of keywords - too many semi-related keywords in one adgroup with a generic text ad that isn't highly relevant to all those keywords.
Or Maybe your landing page can use some tweaking. Either way, this is a good fist start to help narrow down what the problem(s) is/are.
"generic text ad that isn't highly relevant to all those keywords."I agree, it seems to be a major QS issue.
We did manage to get them to manually review the account and get it sorted. We had to go a few more steps up the authority ladder as the usual reps couldn't do anything for us but knew there was something really wrong with what they saw so it got escalated pretty quickly.
There was a glitch somewhere and the account is back to normal now, but it did take a couple of weeks.
It is a newly created account. I created one campaign, one adgroup, one add, and 10 highly relevant keywords.
Some hours later, I created a second adgroup on same campaign, with one add and 6 highly relevant keywords.
All went to a QS of 1/10 ! :(
Were you able to gain any insights into where the problem(s) might be using the keyword analysis tool (magnifying glass next to each keyword)? You can sometimes get a hint of what needs work by looking at that.
As for the text ad you\re using, does it include any or most of the keywords in your adgroup within it?
I don't mind taking a quick look at your current setup and structure to see if I can narrow down where your problem is. If you're up for that, just let me know...
Just wait till you get one saying the min 1st page bid is $119. We are running a well established account, very good CTR & Conversions and it just fell over one day with these crazy bids.We did manage to get them to manually review the account and get it sorted. We had to go a few more steps up the authority ladder as the usual reps couldn't do anything for us but knew there was something really wrong with what they saw so it got escalated pretty quickly.
While cases this extreme are thankfully not too common, they do happen. They most likely come with the complexity Google has of trying to automate the quality score via their algorithm vs. the next to impossible task of doing it manually via human editors.
No matter how good their algorithm gets, there are always going to be errors and exceptions that need to be made. So escalating the claim when you are certain something must be wrong is the way to go. If you don't get answers from the first person you speak with at Google, definitely go higher up to someone more experienced to resolve such issues.
We often intervene on behalf of our clients and from our experience, Google is generally quite responsive, but it can sometimes take talking to several people before you get clear answers or a solution to the problem. Unless you have dedicated reps at Google, you'll often speak with a less experienced junior person, so be patient, but firm in getting them or someone more experienced to properly answer your questions and look at your case individually.
That said, feel free to get in touch with me personally if you'd like a second opinion on such issues so you're better armed with the right info before calling the Adwords team. Knowing what to ask and where in your campaign to look will usually get you better answers and solutions a lot faster which translates to a higher ROI and minimal downtime. :)
My conclusion is that we're not always getting the immediate benefit of the doubt on new campaigns that a good QS should afford us - at least at the moment.
So what I think you do is start out with your bids a tad high, but control it with your daily budget, and wait a few days to a week to see how your quality scores look before going whole hog.
If you don't see a significant improvement, at that point I'd definitely go to support.
it says Keyword Relevance is Ok, Landing Page Load Time is Ok, but Landing Page says "This page isn't highly relevant. Based on the relevance of the associated keyword and ad text, page content, and page functionality"
I would also test sending traffic to another page perhaps deeper into your site. Ideally you want to send traffic to the page that has the most relevant content to the keywords you've chosen combined with what you're saying in your ads.
You might also want to run your landing page through the keyword tool to get an idea of what the adwords robot is seeing on your page. It could be that you have great content but due to coding issues, the content is not easily read by the robot.
For example, keep an eye out for proper use of header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) These are critical to help the robot decipher your content and therefore should be keyword rich where possible.
