Google has assembled an entire army of search quality evaluators to weed out junk sites. Why not then assemble an army of evaluators who's mission is to OK good and relevant pages that the algorithm has possibly misidentified as low quality?
For instance, I just put up a campaign in the content network that is entirely relevant to the keywords I bid on. In fact I got the KWs from running the page through the adwords kw tool.
The landing page resides on a site that everyone would know. Google has 211,000 of its pages in their index. The home page shows a page rank of 8. But somehow the KWs all show a QS of 1-4, with $4-$10 bids, because, I assume that this particular landing page is missing enough kws or the proper meta tags.
I understand that the algo can only make so much of a determination. That's exactly why the human evaluators were hired--to judge pages that the algo mis-identified as high quality.
Why not then also have an avenue for them to look at pages which the algo has misidentified as low-quality or irrelevant? There could be a way for advertisers to request this, just like we can request exceptions to misidentified ads or KWs. It seems like that would benefit consumers, advertisers, and google.
What do you think?
Also, the reason the keywords have initial low quality scores if you've never ran them with that display URL before (and gotten terrible CTR) is because of crappy past advertiser history. (other advertisers had a bad CTR so Google penalizes newcomers and we have to "prove them wrong". AKA guilty until proven innocent.
Your landing page is not the problem. It is CTR. Get your CTR up. Separate general keywords from specific. Make sure all your keyword in an ad group match you text ad. If you have 100 keywords in your ad group you probably need to re think that ad group.
Sorry, none of that applies. I have one kw per adgroup and the kw as the ad title. I know all about that stuff but that's not the issue. There's no CTR to be had. I put the campaign up through adwords editor and instantly saw the poor QS. The ads never showed at all so there's no CTR.
The QS you see doesn't apply to the content network, just Google search.
That's not true any more. I don't run search and content in the same campaign. You can see the QS and min first page bid in adwords editor for content campaigns. The QS and min bids apply in content just like they do in search. They used to be a little more lenient in content but over the last couple of months they've started putting the hammer down.
I put up 6-10 new campaigns a week in all sorts of verticals and I've seen this change happen consistently.
Also, the reason the keywords have initial low quality scores if you've never ran them with that display URL before (and gotten terrible CTR) is because of crappy past advertiser history.
I know that can happen but I kind of doubt that this is the situation in this case because the page in question had only been up one or two days before I linked to it. It's possible but it seems unlikely in this situation.
But anyway...none of that was to the point of my original post. The details of that campaign were just one of a dozen examples that I could have pulled out of my hat.
The real question was, given that the algo is not perfect, wouldn't it be smart for google to allow us to easily ask for a review, just like we can do when they mistakenly disapprove an ad or KW? They'd make more money, the searcher gets to see a relevant landing page, and the advertiser gets to make money too.
The real question was, given that the algo is not perfect, wouldn't it be smart for google to allow us to easily ask for a review, just like we can do when they mistakenly disapprove an ad or KW? They'd make more money, the searcher gets to see a relevant landing page, and the advertiser gets to make money too.
Given the number of advertisers and the number of landing pages in the program, it wouldn't scale. The quality evaluators pick sites more or less at random (as I understand it) whereas every single advertiser with a QS of 9 or under would want a landing page review.
Get an objective third party to look at your keywords, your ad and your landing page (but mostly your keywords and your ads) You don't say how long your campaigns have been up, but they take a while to settle out.
We all think our work is stellar, wonderful, can't be improved upon. EVERYONE and EVERYTHING can be improved upon.
Are your landing pages on your own site, or are you affiliate pointing to the vendor's site?
Adwords support told me specifically that content network QS is not published in Adwords Editor (the QS and first page bid estimate is for Google.com, that's what they told me. It will still show you it, even if you're campaign is just content network and isn't running on Google.com or the search network).
Also, I agree they should have reviewers go back and re-review pages but I doubt they'll do it.
The initial QS that Google shows you for your keyword(s) that you uploaded isn't based on your landing page meta keywords or data on the page. It's based on your display URL's past CTR history/competitor's past performance.
If you don't believe me, go take one of your keywords that has a poor QS and create a new adgroup with the exact match of the keyword and use "About.com" as the display URL and the QS should go up and first page bid down. Don't even change the destination URL, just the display to "About.com" and you'll see what I mean.
