I have a site about Widget Fish and the keyword is Widget Fish and I get a 2?
Whatup wit dat jazz?
Ad is great, landing page good. No other visible problems.
I'm stumped, or gutted. (keeping with the theme)
[edited by: tedster at 6:10 am (utc) on Jan. 16, 2010]
Son built a site for keyword "widget" "widget.com" is the domain name as well. Switched from "example.com" to "widget.com" for keywords in "widget".
Went from 7 to Low Score ads not showing due to poor quality. I suspected it was under review but nope so after a couple days of ads not showwing and nothing he did made the low score change he switched back to "example.com" and back to 7.
BTW the site comes up #1 for the search term "widget" in the serps.
I can't understand it and I feel there is some serious problems with the adwords bot sometimes for some strange reason.
I can answer for my son no the campaign was not new but since they owned the domain of the keyword they figured it was best to switch to that site on the adwords campaign.
Site was all about widget, domain was widget.com, and the keyword being bid on was widget.
This should have been nothing but a 10/10 but came in as a 1 until he switched over to the other domain and it came right back to a 7.
So you are saying the domain is the problem?
Wdiget-Fish.com
with the copy stories about Widget Fish and keywords
widget fish
"widget fish"
[widget fish]
yes it is new campaign netmeg
site is a year old
I always feel like I am swimming upstream with Google.
[edited by: tedster at 6:09 am (utc) on Jan. 16, 2010]
There are some keywords, most notably in the video gaming niche that are completely locked out (with FPBs of $5-$10) because of this very issue.
It's the most Bass akward (to use the theme of this thread) system i've ever seen.
So you are saying that particular keyword is jacked by Gorg?
It is an industry the company is interested in itself so maybe they are getting pissey about it.
It has something to do with the word green.
You wouldn't think they would jade things in their own favor?
Nah, that could never happen.
They don't do evil, they just do you!
Just seems like I always keep taking the bait!
That's the *whole* idea behind QS. You can't have a point system and not compare your results against those of other advertisers. Wouldn't make sense otherwise.
Let's use a real-world example to illustrate. You're a baseball player and your batting average is 280. You base your talent against those of the other players in the league. Indeed, everybody does. That's your "quality score". Having a talent evaluation system where you don't compare the same metrics with those of others wouldn't be worth much, would it?
In Adwords, the relevancy of an ad is judged by the CTR. The searchers determine your quality, not you. The proof is in the pudding as they say. So if your QS=3, the users have judged your ad less relevant. This of course affects your price.
Now, having said all that, I admit there are times, especially lately it seems, that the system is not as good at determining what is a relevant keyword as it used to be. Leaves me scratching my head sometimes.
So if your QS=3, the users have judged your ad less relevant.
There are cases where you get it almost immediately with a new domain, no way that users affected it.
IMO, it could be the history based on similarity that Google uses. Since the domain had no history with AdWords, it could be that G's system somehow determines the quality by comparing the site to previous ones that were similar to it (per Google, we could find out that they were not similar much or at all).
Then your site gets QS, based on the keywords you've entered.
Many of us witnessed sites of QS 7-10, where 10 was for major keywords, and sites were selling well, CTR was through the roof, just to get 1 for all keywords one morning - manual review - say most of us - we still can't say that for sure.
It is really hard to figure out this stuff. In the past, for many it was enough to focus on visitors, which would ultimately result in a good or super quality, but now, people are forced to think how to satisfy AdBot.
Even if Google disagrees, they still made us think that way. Google, then users.
They just had to get you to believe in the concept of them as god ( the entity which can affect your every day life without rhyme or reason ..and to which you must be supplicant ..or at least pass via the adwords interface = "priesthood" ) ..
Now they have made the concept "manifest"...
Most just pay and pray ..
Thus it was always ..
The singer may change ..or their place within the chorus may recede or come to the fore ..but the song is the same ..
Pay and pray ..thence lies salvation ..But salvation is a lie ..an illusion ..maya ..
There are other ways to "exist"..
However to suggest such is "heresy" ..
And what is worse may even involve co-operation as opposed to danegeld ..and if real sites voting for real sites went too far where would all the imagined sky/net piksies and their "magic"/"algos" and their priests and their shamans and their acolytes and their temple hoories be :)
As air said recently..one can wish ...
And giving links without thought of return but just on merit or because one wishes to encourage ..and because one can give links ..is good ..and breaks the shackles ..and is how it should be ..and is a step to liberation :)
On a new campaign, I myself would probably try to build it up slowly, and with patience. Pick out the few keywords you absolutely have to have, and pay the high cost, controlling it with your daily budget. Build up some CTR and history. Write some really good ads. It may take a number of weeks.
Depending on what they want and if it's reasonable, then all new accounts are going to pay a premium for a while until you have a history and some CTR data. So, expect to pay a little more in the beginning.
If however they want an outragious amount, your betting off spending your money with Bing or Yahoo and will get better converting traffic instead throwing large amounts of money down the Google money pit hoping they give you a better score.
I don't mean "comparative" quality score, or quality score that has been normalized by the others in the niche. There is a keyword level quality score that exists independently of an advertiser. If you notice, many keywords on Google have no one advertising on them, even if they seem to be perfectly legitimate keywords. The reason for this is that the quality score of the keyword itself (independently of the advertiser) is so poor that no one in their right mind would bid the insanely high FPBs needed to get past the QS penalty.
How can that be? You need a point of reference. It can't be independent of history. You have references to this?
More often than not you'll find that you'll end up with 2-4 QS without ever triggering an impression. They have nothing else to judge your keyword on so they go by how that keyword performed for other advertisers.
I've never seen any press on this, but have witnessed it happen countless times and can repeat it in testing over and over. As i said, it's very common in media queries, especially video games.
My feeling if you get any QS, it's because they have a good idea how it will perform. It may not be right and that's why you can see wild fluctuations in the first few days.
And yes, I've seen myself ads without impressions getting a QS set. They often get a 10. By your logic, I guess the keyword is easy to score well. But that doesn't make sense because this implies that all advertisers have a QS of 10 for that keyword and that is impossible just like it's impossible that even a vast majority of advertisers have a QS of 3.
So we are looking for the genie in the bottle here except G is playing the shell game with it. Cloaking it so it appears hidden in various vectors, none of which we can pinpoint as the actual catalyst(s) causing the events. Or better known as, smoke and mirrors and on a grand scale.
It's not the all you can eat fish fry it used to be.
