I activated my first campaign two weeks ago and finally got an "Approved (non-family)" type of approval. It received 630 impressions with quality scores 10's and 7's the first day. The second day most quality scores drop. The third day, only 2-3 keywords survive. Most are rated 3 or 4 with min. bids 0.40-1.00.
My campaign has about 20 AdGroups and 286 keywords in total. All keywords are used by top marketers already.
Relevancy should not be the issue. Not that I can see it. My original set has 500 keywords and I reduced it too 286 to avoid inrelvancy. All bids are no more than 0.25 and exact match only. Two things about my campaign worries me. The campaign markets a male enlargement program. It took Google 2 weeks to grant an "Approval(non-familiy)" status. AdWords Suppor sends me an e-mail saying my ads are disapproved. it was getting impressions though. secondly, I use URL masking which I heard different opinion if Google hates it. The drop of quality scores looks very systematic. Now about 60% keywords are $1.00 with the other $0.40. The per product commission is $45 that makes raising bids impossible. Here is my rescue plan:
1. add a decent landing page,
2. allow tightly related keywords only in a group
3. make ads AdGroup targeted
4. remove keywords with bad quality scores?
5. add more keywords - Optimizer suggests phrase match keywords.
The other possibility is just pull this one off and apply the lessions I learned to te next one. However I heard the next campaign will get affected and start poorly too.
WHat do you think?
Warren
Posts: 9
Joined: Wed Jun 03, 2009 7:48 am
Assuming your ads are approved, I would suggest focusing on options 2 and 3. Keywords in each of your ad groups should be very similar to each other and ads should closely match the ad group's keywords. As a rule of thumb, if you could write a more tailored and targeted ad for a keyword if it were to have its own ad group, split out the keyword into its own ad group and write a more tailored and targeted ad for it.
Having a highly granular structure and tailored ads will not only help improve Quality Score, but CTR is also likely to improve so CPCs could reduce.
The comment you made about Quality Scores of 7 and 10 at the start is very common. Before a keyword has any history, Google award approximate Quality Scores based on only a handful of relevancy factors (i.e. how close your keywords match your ads, how relevant your keywords are to your landing pages etc). However, once a keyword has history, and Google can better understand how relevant users find your keywords and ads, Quality Scores are updated to include data. A Quality Score of 3 or 4 suggests a low CTR - users are not finding your ads as relevant as the competition.
Google has stated lately that affiliate marketing doesn't really fit its adwords business policy. Somewhere along the line your ads are getting disapproved / low QS, your best bet without a doubt in my mind is to concentrate on option 1. Make a good landing page, with your advertising below the fold, and useful, unique content that is highly relevant to the keywords in the ad group your targeting
