QS Sharp Drop

What are best practices to bring it back?

[chewy]

So I'm working on a big campaign these days - with ad spend way up there...

Our best keyword had a QS of 7 and we had years of history of a decent CTR on this.

We had some accidental hiccups when a clueless developer changed the server and all the advertising urls suddenly went 404 and remained so for a few days.

In recovering, several WRONG url's were used to try to rectify the situation (I think they tried to use 301 redirects) and then finally the old landing page was correctly configured.

I came in late to the party and saw that QS had dropped from a 7 to a 3 and is now a 2. Of course CTR is terrible and the bid required to get any traffic is almost 5X of what it has been historically.

We now get that great message "your ad is rarely shown due to low quality score".

Of course, the adcopy, the campaign and adgroup as well as the landing page are extremely carefully optimized for the key phrase - and still - a week and several thousand dollars later - the QS is down to 2.

Besides waiting, what are best practices as to next steps?

Of course, as there are thousands of keywords, this is going to take a while as most are down although not quite as extreme as this one.


What are WebmasterWorld people's experiences on similar situations and what can we outline as possible best best practices?

- Tweak the keywords and sneak in some QS 10 keywords in there?

- "Freshen" the ad copy?

- Push to get a "manual review" knowing full well this is unlikely

- Reach out to our corporate partner's brand new adwords reps who seem to know less about this than most?

- Turn up the bid, turn off the computer and take a vacation?

- Chalk it up to "summer doldrums" and find another client?

- What would Netmeg do? :-)


PS - The term "best practices" is an extremely useful word to search on pertaining to QS and AdWords - to those who reach the bottom of this thread - close readers and people in the know should all try to use it appropriately and a bit more frequently. Hopefully this will keep the level of discussion high and the allow us to filter out the noise. Thanks!

[RhinoFish]

"a week and several thousand dollars later - the QS is down to 2"

so after the site issues were repaired, your QS is still ~2? if so, the site issues from before aren't the problem (assuming you're talking about several thousand clicks as well). something else is tanking your QS. jump into their WMT account and see if there's something obviously busted.

QS2 is a ton worse than QS3, and often indicates something heinous. even a fairly crappy site and disorganized adwords account should have few QS2s.

[chewy]

RF -

These are expensive words, just by the way.

Will check WMT. That's a good thought.

We also know that the competitive nature on some of these phrases has also changed significantly.

What others are offering has the same name as what we are offering, but what the competition is doing broadly appeals to students and unemployed people, while what we are offering applies narrowly and only to companies.

Subsequently, they get a much higher CTR rate, just as a matter of course.

as ususal, I can kvetch about how I want to have a b2b only side of Google, but I know that's probably going nowhere!

[netmeg]

Well I never had quite this situation happen before. But I think what I would do is take a few of my most important keywords and separate them out into a new campaign and see if I can resuscitate them with spot on ads and MAKE SURE THE DESTINATION URL IS CORRECT. You might have to turn the dial way up on the spend in order to get the CTR up at first, but if you're not doing thousands of keywords, it's probably better to turn it way up on a few really important keywords than halfway up on thousands of so-so ones. Let it sit for a week or two and see what happens. If it seems to work, then slowly add more keywords and ad groups to the NEW campaign, till you've more or less re-created what was there before.

If that doesn't work, then there's probably another reason for the big drop, and you have to look at that.