Keyword relevance "Poor": How come?

I thought I understood Quality score...

[JonBoy]

I'm just getting back into Adwords after some years off. Helping out my girlfriend setting up her business.

I thought I knew my stuff but I'm getting my head handed to me on a plate. Any advice appreciated ...

I'm getting Quality score 2/10 and keyword relevance: poor in the situation below. Why?

keyword phrase match "widgeting"
Geo targeting my city
Ad headline: "widgeting therapy my city"
Ad copy: "tailored to your needs, one on one with a my city specialist"
Landing page is long text and has widget and widgeting on it many many times, including page title, meta description, H1, text at top of page, etc.
Search CTR 1%
Only other keywords in ad group are widgeting, broad and exact match.

Why the hate from big G?

I'm wondering if I should have widget/widgeting in my ad body as well as headline, but can this be all there is to it?

Are there any tools worth using that give some sense of how G understands my landing page?

Big thanks for anyone's thoughts

[RhinoFish]

+ctr is a much bigger factor that your landing page.

+what's the QS for your exact and broad (a trick question, but asking it anyhow)?

+yes, good to include the search term in your ad, adds bolding, will help get you noticed.

+adding some extensions may help (sitelinks, product extensions).

+your ad copy is poor (though the widget substitution makes my judging this arbitrary) - add more ad variants.

+add negs, lots of them. use the keyword tool to find high volume suggestions, but in this case, use the suggestions for neg ideas.

+further mine negs by playing the ABC game... go to google, type is 'widgeting a', view auto complete entries for G's search suggestions (they are high volume by definition), use the concepts presented there to compile your neg list... then type 'widgeting b', 'widgeting c'...

+when you tell us your CTR, know that it's absolute value can't be judged, it's relative to your competition... gotta be better than them to "look" good, so 1% could be great, or suck heiny - we can't tell (neither can you, but the low QS is a strong hint that your relative CTR sux heiny).

+consider chasing 2-word keyword phrases and beyond, 1-word keywords are often a very serious challenge for several various reasons.

+have fun!

[JonBoy]

Thanks for that RhinoFish ... some really useful stuff there. Especially the ABC autosuggest game was a new one on me.

I'm not getting any idea from what you said why the "keyword relevance" is reckoned to be "poor".

That's the one that really has me stumped. If the keyword is strongly in the ad and the main theme of the landing page, what's causing this?

+ctr is a much bigger factor that your landing page.

And this low CTR is what's mostly driving the QS down here I imagine, with a bit of help from "keyword relevance: poor"

+what's the QS for your exact and broad (a trick question, but asking it anyhow)?

The same as the phrase match

+yes, good to include the search term in your ad, adds bolding, will help get you noticed.

Will adding search term to ad body boost keyword relevance, or is once in the ad title enough to cover that?

+add negs, lots of them. use the keyword tool to find high volume suggestions, but in this case, use the suggestions for neg ideas.

Gotcha; get rid of all the lower CTR search phrases to drive up this keywords CTR; if I still want to have a punt on these phrases, have a different ad group for that.

+consider chasing 2-word keyword phrases and beyond, 1-word keywords are often a very serious challenge for several various reasons.

I'm doing some of that already for the most relevant ones, but maybe I need to expand that and give up on the catchall widgeting keyword.


I've got display and search running on the same keywords. I know this is not best practice as it makes budgeting and reporting clumsier, but it's not messing with G's appraisal of my true CTR and keyword relevance is it?

thanks again mate
Jon

[LucidSW]

I've had similar problems last year. My understanding was that the system gave relevancy or not based on the keyword and the theme of the landing page. For example, you bid on "widget" but your page is about something else, you'd get poor keyword relevancy.

However, talking to a Google rep, they told me that the system will automatically assign poor relevancy if the click rate is poor. In other words, when the QS falls to 3. As CTR is the biggest factor of QS, you need to dramatically increase it. Sure enough, when that eventually happened, the keyword relevancy changed to OK.

[RhinoFish]

I'm not getting any idea from what you said why the "keyword relevance" is reckoned to be "poor".
That's the one that really has me stumped. If the keyword is strongly in the ad and the main theme of the landing page, what's causing this?

And this low CTR is what's mostly driving the QS down here I imagine

Yep.

[RhinoFish]

Will adding search term to ad body boost keyword relevance, or is once in the ad title enough to cover that?

Yes, but it's the CTR impact that is most important. Getting a click is 2 steps:
1) get noticed (bold)
2) compelling ad text

the count of times the word is used can be overdone - test variants to learn what works best.

[RhinoFish]

I've got display and search running on the same keywords. I know this is not best practice as it makes budgeting and reporting clumsier, but it's not messing with G's appraisal of my true CTR and keyword relevance is it?

+stop doing this in same campaign, bad practice.

+correct, your Display CTR doesn't negatively impact your G's grading of your Search CTR / QS - but... it affects yours. when you mix S and D, the ads stats are combined, so as you build / test / cull / pare ads, you'll be basing these decisions on their aggregate S+D stats.