Quality Score plummeted

[vanillaice]

This was odd, today I woke up and about 95% of my keywords in a campaign were inactive. I don't understand this. The worst part is, they required .30c per click to activate minimum (most higher). This was a keyword I was paying .06c a click for yesterday and have greatly improved my campaign over the past few days.

Here are some numbers from my campaign from the past 7 days, after improvements..

821 clicks - 17,628 ims - 4.6% CTR - 0.06 cpc - 5.3 rank

Here are some numbers YTD until improvements..

3,839 c - 134,705 I - 2.8& CTR - 0.07 CPC - 6.4 rank

So I clearly improved my campaign a little, but it still wasn't terrible before. Today I had the issue and contacted google, and he said my quality score was low. How could that be? I did change my landing page through these changes, but my landing page was very relevant to the ads.

Has this happened to anyone? What can I do? I tried to delete the campaign and create a new one, with a new landing page, same issue.

Thanks for any advice!

[metakomm]

who the hell knows with google...lol

i had a keyword that had a double digit CTR and was ranked #1 and a blue ad and paid .02/click for over 6 months then overnight the keyword went inactive and they wanted $1/click...I gave in to google's price gouging and have gotten the keyword and have gotten the price to about $.40/click in 2 months...and I didn't change any ads or the landing page because everything was relevant and following google's guidelines...

[mmccabe]

This happened to my campaign recently also (although not many of my keywords were disabled). I made some significant changes to my landing pages over the last few weeks as well. I still haven't figured out how to correct the issue entirely. If you make any breakthroughs, PLEASE post back. I'll be sure to do the same.

Miguel

[vanillaice]

The last thing I did was work on the landing page, put it in a different folder, pointed the dest URL there, and some keywords seem to be active now. Gonna see tomorrow for sure.

My *guess* was this...

I was promoting www.redwidgets.com. My landing page and domain was www.bluewidgets.com, but I copied a lot from redwidgets.com, including the name 'Red Widgets', because I was basically using it as an entrance page. Now, I have blue widgets as my site which I use to promote red widgets. Maybe now it just looks less deceiving, so they re-approved it.

[vanillaice]

Nevermind, that didn't seem to work. Woke up today and still see a bunch of inactive yets, but a small amount of impressions and clicks, it's really confusing. When I do a search for them, I don't see the ad however.

Another gripe i'm having with them lately is their insanely slow approval time of ads. I made a small change to one of my ads sometime yesterday, and still hasn't been approved yet. What's happening with google? I heard their stock was dropping, are they making cuts and starting to squeeze their advertisers, or is this just a coincidence?

[vanillaice]

To update this..

Still no word back from google on the support ticket I created on the same day as this thread. I did speak to someone in live chat on the same day, so maybe they ignored the ticket because of that. I wonder how long before I should send another.

I decided to take a few keywords today and activate them, just to see what happens. Maybe I just need to bid UP to 0.30 just to get it activated, but nope, not the way this seems to be working in this campaign. Every keyword disabled is showing me the price it takes to take over the #1 spot on the list. They won't even allow me to hang out in the 4-5 spot area. I don't understand that.

Why would they force a campaign that was running smooth to either take over #1 or be disabled? That doesn't seem very fair.

Maybe I don't exactly understand what quality score is, or how it's formulated, so can someone please explain why they require you to take over the top spot once your quality score gets to a certain level? Thanks!