Hi, I have tried to find the answer to this by searching the forums, so apologies if the answer is already here somewhere. I hope this is a simple answer, because it is driving me nuts! I have been using Adwords for about a month. For the first three weeks it was really good, but now my impressions and clicks have dropped like a stone. I was tweaking the settings each day to try to optimise my results. Geography, timing, accelerated delivery, bids. All that good stuff. I have gone back over my change history for a particular Ad Group to see what may have impacted my results. I have also looked at the charts on a day by day basis as well, to match what change might have had such a bad effect on the Ads. The only thing I can come up with, is that initially, I don't think within the key word settings, I had specified a destination URL (default URL). But had only done that against each ad. At the time when my ads dropped dramatically, it seems I added destination URLs to all the key words as well. So in effect I had destination URLs specified against each key word, as well as against each ad. But they were the same destination URL. So...what is the relationship between these two destination URL settings? Can I in fact not set a destination URL against each ad word, but just do it against each ad? Do you need to set one in both tables? Any help really appreciated.
I suppose that when you add the destination url to any keyword, the quality score for its landingpage is reset as google assumes that you changed it. If you have some competition this can make a difference in performance... Generally you don't want to specify an url for a keyword if it's the same as your adgroup, why would you? Also, and possibly even more important: If you have any keyword in your adgroup that performs especially well and it has a custom url assigned to it, it's very much worth considering making this a seperate adgroup with that keyword and url, and writing the ad itself so it matches the keyword even more. So imho it's only worth assigning an url to a keyword if it isn't in the top-5 most important keywords in your adgroup (these should become seperate ad groups), and only if: - its different from your adgroup url - the landing page is still relevant to the add content (and the keyword ofcourse)