About two months ago we needed to switch from US$ billing to GBP and so were forced to make a new account by Google, you can't convert the account. They assured us the history transference would occur in a few weeks.
So, we took a plunge and at the same time, perhaps wrongly, switched the site from a .net to a .co.uk (mainly for SEO, but also for a bit more relevancy for the searcher) and moved from a US IP to a UK IP (note - the whole site's targeted at the UK..). All the redirects etc are perfect, destination URLs changed accordingly.
We experienced a bump in min bids which we expected, but this went down as QS quickly came back up to great/excellent.
Then, in the last two weeks, we've noticed that minimum bids have started shooting up. QS hasn't changed. Our old US$ account on keyword X says minimum front page bid $20 (expected); on the UK account it's £61 - about 5x. Remember - same site, same billing address, same company - just a UK IP and a few other QS improvements.
Does the machine simply screw up now and again? So far G has said it's "normal", but the product sold by everyone on that keyword has a max profit of about £15.. so unless there's a collection of really stupid advertisers I think they're not quite right... Plus, by about page three you're getting into arbitrage and super generic sites.
Anyone got any ideas or experience of this kind of thing?
Thanks for your time, as always.
They assured us the history transference would occur in a few weeks.
Hard to comment on your specific case, but the more I look at QS the less sense it makes. I think we all assume that Google is an all-knowing machine that can calculate everything to the nth degree. But in reality they are bound to screw it up regularly. This site is full of people chasing down theories about QS, but most of the time I think complicated algorithms are bound to give unexpected results every now and then. Unfortunately for you, it can be very painful.
Cheers.
