Low quality score, is it because we have competitor terms?

[nitch]

Hi all,

How's it going? As you can tell I'm new to this forum but Google searches for other problems have led me this way. I'm just starting out with AdWords and at the moment my brain is fried from trying to take in all the information.

Anyway, I've been looking at a campaign that someone who left started and although I think the client is happy with the results, the CTR is around 0.25% and the avg position is 5.8. Looking at the quality score, most keywords seem to be getting poor relevance scores which is why I assume the position is quite low.

I've noticed that there we have 7 specific adgroups targeting competitor searches. As the name of the competitor obviously is not in our ad or the page it links to, the relevance will drop.

From your experience, would this drag down the quality score of the whole campaign?

Many thanks in advance

[nitch]

Does anyone know if this would affect the quality score? I possibly wasn't very clear so here's an example:

If I was selling 'red cars' and was competing with 'yellow cars' so decided to add a keyword [yellow cars] so my ad would display when someone was searching my competitor, would I be penialised with a low quality score?

Also so you get penalised for having lots of keywords that get very little impression let alone CTR?

Thanks again

[netmeg]

Your keywords have to be very relevant to your ads. So yea, if your ad was about red cars and only red cars, and you take out the keyword yellow cars - you *might* come up for a really broad match, but likely you will not have good quality scores.

That's not to say you can't run those terms, but know ahead of time that you're never going to get good QS on them, and maybe separate them out into their own campaign, so they don't drag down your good performers. Even one bad (overly broad) keyword in an ad group can make a difference.

[briggidere]

Are you more worried about the quality score of the keywords or the ROI from each keyword.

I run numerous campaigns where the quality is very low, but the client gets a fantastic return on these terms.

Google mostly uses the CTR as the quality signal, but I'm more interested in the cost/conversion than the CTR.

You need to think about how the lower quality terms can bring down the overall quality of the account history over time. There are 7 AdGroups doing this, but what % of overall search impressions is this bringing in? If it is high, it may be worth deleting them for a month or 2 and then seeing what effect it has had on the campaign. You can always reactivate them again if you need to.