Transitioning to new website with adwords

Best way to transfer adwords quality score juice

[lgn1]

We are rebranding our website, and are transitioning our adwords to the new site.

We have been hit twice on the Quality score issue, as we decided to open a new adwords account in the MCC, in my native currency.

When we transferred the campaigns over to the new account (Google linked the accounts in MCC to make it legit), we lost very little if any Quality Score. Most of our QS's are in the 8-10 range.

We then paused the old campaigns for the old site and created new campaigns for the new website. All the ads are identical, except for the URL.

Since we are starting fresh with the new Ad's, we got hit hard, with most QS's in the 4 to 7 range. It will cost us practically double to get the same amount of Google traffic with the poorer quality score, which is not profitable.

This basically killed my plans for a quick switch over, so this is was I proposed doing, and someone tell me if this works.

I turned my old Campaigns back on, so I would get my Ads displayed using the old bids on our High QS site.

I turned on the new Campaigns, and will leave then on until the QS comes up with age, although they will get extremely few impressions, as the old website campaign will always win the bids.

I'm confused if my QS score for the old website ads will come down, and the new campaigns QS will come up to meet somewhere in the middle.

Does this work, or is there a better way of doing this, without spending a fortune?

I'm in no rush for the rebranded website, and can wait a few months, to save on bidding.

[RhinoFish]

Sounds like you're Double Serving now, so your troubles are about to get far, far worse.

[support.google.com...]

[lgn1]

All our accounts are linked to avoid any possibility of double serving. Also both websites have their own campaigns under the same account.

[RhinoFish]

Linking accounts via MCC does not avoid DS.

If they're in the same AdWords account, you're golden, it is not possible to Double Serve if a single AdWords account is in use.

[lgn1]

Linking accounts via MCC does not avoid DS.

Google specifically linked our accounts for purpose of accidentally preventing double serving, at our request, as we run several accounts for different divisions of our company. I recommend that any company in the same position, do the same.

This is something you must specifically ask Google for, and they will send an email to confirm the linking to prevent double serving; just in case there is a misunderstanding down the road.

Now that this diversion is out of the way.

When you have two equal campaigns, identical in each way except one is two years old, and the other is one day old, and they point to the same identical content, but with a different URL. Call one New the other Old

A) Will New eventually catch up to Old in QS
B) Will Old Drop, and New Rise and meet in the middle
C) or Will Old drop to New

I'm thinking long term (several months at least)

[RhinoFish]

Yes, they should be able to catch up, and it should only take a week or two.
But QS is complex, many other factors could change what I said above.
For example, if the Old one is very well known, it's brand strength might lead to a higher CTR, and it'll take years for the new one to catch up, if ever.

How do the CTRs compare (it's the largest QS factor)?

[lgn1]

CTR rate is higher across the board on the new site, compared to the old site. Our new domain name is short and easy to remember. Our old domain name had a tremendous excessiveness of superlatives :)

[RhinoFish]

It'll pass it up.
There are many ingredients to QS, but CTR trumps everything else.

Use GWT to make sure their are no indexing issues on the new site.

One thing that can slow you down... name traffic (bidding on your own domain name) raises your account wide CTR, your old established site likely had repeat visitors who pumped up this small contributor. Might take 5-10 time the length of your average sales funnel, before your repeat biz at new looks anything like the old.