Quality score

[dgoodchild]

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I've just started a new campaign for an affilistore site which has a few hundred keywords in place.
What I don't understand is ; I have a good quality score for "shiny cars" but a poor quality score for "shiny car" (keyword names changed to protect the guilty)

Reason being - This keyword is not highly relevant.
Based on the keyword's relevance to the associated ad text, CTR, historical keyword usage and other performance factors.

Any ideas ? Should I be adding "shiny car" into the ad text ? Making it more prominent on the landing page ?
Or is it just the big G being its' usual confusing self ?

[grobinso]

Read the thread 'End of minimum bid ' in this section, especially my test campaign results and you will see what a joke 'Quality Score' is.

If you do find out what the answer is please let us all know. Good luck

Graham

[Shane]

if you really want a laugh give google ireland a ring and ask them that exact question.

It's like talking to jehova witness's as they do believe what they tell you even when you can give countless examples of it just not being the case, just how does one get a good quality score for a keyword not even on a site, yet the main theme of the site, with countless pages about it and 10/15 mentions of it on the page... get scored as poor !? .. one of life's great mysteries.. even scooby doo and the team couldn't solve it

even more fun is to ask them to explain why a site ranks number 1 organically yet is scored poor in adwords for the term it ranks no1 on :tup

they told a mate of mine last week when he enquired (he was bored and felt like some telephone fun) it was because both algo's work differently... silly me I thought relevancy was the aim of google serps.. so how can a site be the most relevant out of 200,000 organic listings yet poor and therefore irrelevant in PPC listings

[tbp]

I`ve had exactly the same as mentioned in the minimum quality score thread.

For my main keyphrase that i`m number 1 for in the natural search results, i`m getting a 3/10 for the quality score, and both are judged by the same content. Doesn't make any sense what so ever, especially as I had a CTR of between 30 - 50% and a high conversion rate.

I know there are changes going on at the moment, some of which involve the quality score which is supposed to be assessed much more frequently, and I think its a bug. Something like this happens every year though, and in the past Ive had to shut down the account and restart it again (with exactly the same keywords) to go back to getting a good score. The latest update is supposed to stop this, but it all seems very sketchy and that part doesn't look like its implemented yet.

Its very frustrating! For me its actually worked well as i`m getting more hits to my natural search results, and they are converting better, so sales have gone up and my adwords cost has plummeted. Not sure how long this will last for though...

[grobinso]

Something like this happens every year though, and in the past Ive had to shut down the account and restart it again (with exactly the same keywords) to go back to getting a good score.

TBP, when you say shut down and restart , did you mean cancel the account and get a completely new one or just re-activate the cancelled account ?

I've just cancelled my account tonight as all my campaigns are sunk, think i'll take a break from Adwords while it sorts itself out.

Graham

[tbp]

TBP, when you say shut down and restart , did you mean cancel the account and get a completely new one or just re-activate the cancelled account ?

I had to shut down (or abandon) my Adwords account, and open a new one up with a different username. In some cases I also had to change the domain for the landing page as well, as they seemed to blacklist them. That usually have another 6 - 8 months before it happened again.

Although it sounds like it, they were genuine ads with a decent site behind them (which all the way through stayed at position 1 for the same keywords and content). They got good CTR's and conversion rates as well, so the public obviously thought them relevant and useful.

Nothing that you can do really, I used to get really angry about it, but in the end it doesn't solve anything so now I just usually move on and start again.

Unfortunately, there's no real competition. I run the same keywords on Yahoo and MSN, and they get such a tiny amount of traffic (impressions) compared with Google its not worth bothering. My MSN account costs me about £2 a month lol, compared to around £150 for Google. Conversions are good, but such a low traffic volume it doesn't help.

[sgpratley]

Bit off topic, but is there an easy way to see all the quality scores of your keywords in a report rather than hunting through all the adgroups? I had a poke about today and couldn't find anything.

I'm finding exactly the same thing despite creating a stack of 100% unique, optimised landing pages, I can't see any pattern between the ones that are marked good and those marked poor, but the natural search is coming in nicely on all of them :-)

There seems to be more weight to the CTR of the ad than anything else, I've got one campaign I set up with 1 keyword per group, with broad phrase and exact versions in separate adgroups and it's the mostly the broad stuff that's marked down, but even that's not very consistent.

[tbp]

For me, I`ve seen no relation to low CTR. Its actually my highest CTR ads that were hit the hardest.

The odd thing is my main keyphrase that the site is built around, and is the domain name etc (thats number 1 in natural search) was hit with a 3/10 relevancy score. Another keyphrase which is only mentioned once on the entire site gets 7/10 for relevancy. Really doesn't make any sense.

The only thing I can think of is that because everything the visitor needs is on the front page, the site appears to have a high bounce rate, as visitors don't need to go to other pages on the site, everything is laid out for them (which is why conversions are so good). I wonder if maybe i`m getting penalised for this, as when people click through to the merchant Google sees them as not being on the site for long and not going anywhere else on the site. If this is correct, what do you do? I don't want to make the site worse for users, so they have to move around to get the info, just to please Google.

It still doesn't explain the keyword relevancy situation above though.

[dgoodchild]

Bit off topic, but is there an easy way to see all the quality scores of your keywords in a report rather than hunting through all the adgroups? I had a poke about today and couldn't find anything.

I'm finding exactly the same thing despite creating a stack of 100% unique, optimised landing pages, I can't see any pattern between the ones that are marked good and those marked poor, but the natural search is coming in nicely on all of them :-)

There seems to be more weight to the CTR of the ad than anything else, I've got one campaign I set up with 1 keyword per group, with broad phrase and exact versions in separate adgroups and it's the mostly the broad stuff that's marked down, but even that's not very consistent.

I couldn't find any way to download a report either. Did you have any success finding one ?

[jacstone1]

I too would like to know if anyone can download those reports !

[sgpratley]

nope, I'll post if I find something though

[tonyr]

I agree with everybody here - Q.S. is B.S.

I have recently got back into advertising on adwords and I am finding the quality score to be totally inconsistant. It simply does not work the way they claim it works.

My keywords range from OK to Great, but some of the "OK" ones are more relevant than the great ones. To be honest, I don't care about their quality score nonsense because there are only two things that matter to me:
1. The ads are profitable and
2. They keep showing them (no slaps).

So far so good...

[sgpratley]

From Adwords support, received this morning.

Hello Stephen,

Thank you for your email. I understand you would like to know if it was possible for you to see all the quality scores of your keywords in one report. Allow me to address this in detail below.

The AdWords 'Reports' section lets you generate reports showing performance statistics for your sites and/or keywords, text ads, image ads, URLs, ad groups, campaigns, and account. To run a report that includes your Quality Score details for all your keywords, click the report tab in your account. Then, run a Placement/keyword Performance report, making sure to click the keyword Quality Score Detail checkbox in the Add or Remove Columns section, which is under the Advanced Settings heading.

Now, am I missing something that's staring me in the face? I can't see any of the reports that allow you to select quality score as a column.



Surely Adwords Support know their own interface well enough that they wouldn't just add to the confusion....would they?

[Shane]

Surely Adwords Support know their own interface well enough that they wouldn't just add to the confusion....would they?

I have a vision of them sitting there with a flowchart on the wall that's like :

1 tell chump that QS has many variables and that it's down to many factors and that they should increase their bid and or relevancy.

2 if chump still on line then pause..

3 if no brrrrrr sound can be heard then say "is there aything else I can help you with today" in a slighty arousing irish accent

if chump asks again about QS then mark his account for summary bidjacking across all campaigns and got back to point 1

[dgoodchild]

Interesting but no, I couldn't find it either. I even tried running the report with all boxes ticked to see if it would magically appear. Sadly no again.

I did come across this post - Google Adwords Reports and Quality Score Management Search Marketing Communications which seems to display more boxes than mine (or yours). However, I can't even see a 'quality score' box on his either.