.com.au --> .com kills quality score and ad delivery

[pbaddock]

Apols if this has been covered, but I've searched and read a whole bunch of threads so far - with varying opinions offered:

Here's what happened:
Client spending around $150 per day on a successful adwords campaign for a high profile fashion site in .com.au. Clicks around AU$0.30 on average, good quality score, great conversions - ads were showing .com.au and sending traffic to their .com.au site.

Move their website to .com - (as client is broadening global shipping, and client focus...did all the 301's etc on the organic front) - changed Ads to reflect new .com domain change. All keywords suddenly show poor QS, ad delivery all but stopped.

The page where traffic is sent, is still highly relevant to the keywords, nothing changed other than the domain name.

I've read others saying "wait it out until your CTR history has re-established itself and google will open up the tap again" type stuff - is that the collective wisdom? Is there anything else that can be done?

Tks in advance,
Phil

[BriGuy20]

I'd tell the client to up his bids for a while and to consider that the cost of internationalizing the brand.

Once the ads start to show again you can always lower the bid.

I would say alternatively keep the TLD, revive the ad, and have it soft redirect to the Australian version of the site.

[pbaddock]

Thanks BriGuy20. yeah - I'm thinking of setting up a landing page at the old .com.au domain and set this up to just be optimised for quality score, and redirect back into their online store. In the interim I've upped the bids x10 - which is having no effect.... also tried directing traffic to another more keyword rich, and optimised page - also having no effect....watching...waiting... (G's response on email was simply to point me at the adwords QS policy - gee - thanks).

[pbaddock]

Ok - here's the latest (ads are running again). Before all these issues occured, a few weeks earlier I had copied and pasted the AU campaign and created a variant of the campaign - all identical settings except country targetting - targetted USA & UK with slightly different bid prices. So here's the sequence of what occured, and how I fixed it:

1. Late october created 2 campaigns - AU and UK/USA....AU was going gangbusters - UK/USA was poorly converting...
2. a few days later (after a few thousand non converting clicks) - paused the UK/USA campaign....and started "internationalising" the site ie clarifying shipping policy to o/s, currency settings, pretty flags saying the site shipped to certain locations etc - getting ready for shift to .com to target global markets.
3. Site was ready for shift to global focus....changed the site domain, 301'd .com.au --> .com
4. accordingly went into the (still running) AU campaign - bit the bullet and updated the ads to .com domain (still targetting Aus only)
5. QS collapsed and ads stopped.....then got busy trying to fix this for AU.

In the meantime while trying to troubleshoot the AU campaign, I had re-enabled the UK/USA campaign but had not updated the ad urls (still showing .com.au - technically violating the display / destination policy as the site was now .com - .com.au redirected).

I noticed however that UK/USA was pumping the clicks, but still not converting....couldn't revive AU campaign (showing .com).

So.....here's what I did. I paused the dead AU campaign (had tried pumping bids sky high to get ad delivery up again - no luck, tried changing ads back to .com.au - no luck - paused it).

Changed the working (but still not converting - that's another story) UK/USA campaign to change country targetting back to AU - didn't touch anything else....

Campaign came back to life, ad delivery pumping to Aus, conversions back.

So now:
- I'd bet my mortgage that if I update my ad urls in the Aus campaign to be .com (not .com.au inaccurate url's) I'm going to hit this QS rubbish again despite the campaign working well, and delivering high ad positions - G will kill it on QS reasons like last time
- I'm in limbo because my .com.au ad is out there with the display not matching the destination (but hopefully wont get reviewed any time soon by G)
- The international campaign does not have the ideal ad copy, but I'm scared to ad a new ad version in case I kill the whole lot from a G review of the new ad.

My next strategy / steps:

- create a new account from scratch
- copy and paste the existing campaign using the adwords editor but set the url's to .com - becuase of the url difference, shouldn't get pinged on duplication issues.
- establish that this new campaign is running with ad delivery ok, and no probs
- kill off the old account.

Any thoughts / feedback on this plan of attack - or these latest goings on?

Tks all,
Phil