I'm running a PPC campaign for a client who sells supplemental insurance to military members. They are a quasi-government organization with tons of history in this niche. Our campaign got zapped with $5.00 minimum bids for all keywords like "US (list service branch) (keyword modifier)", or "United States (list service branch) (keyword modifier)", but every keyword with just "(service branch) (keyword modifier" remained. We even built a new keyword-rich domain, landing pages, and google fluff (privacy policy, etc) to run a new campaign, which ran for a few weeks before that one got whacked, too. The odd part is that "us" and "united states" are all over the landing pages. Any ideas on what we could try? Is it possible Google recognizes "US (service) (keyword)" or "United States etc." keywords as government/informational queries where if you don't have a .gov, then they consider it to be spammy? We're going to site-targeted for awhile until our hair grows back, but if you have any ideas, we'd appreciate it.
Maybe your site still has a Quality problem - add content to your landing page and subpages; The Site Quality Score algorithm is not simple like that - they already has conversion rate ratio data of sites that have similar content to yours and they predict if your site is or not relevant with the full keyword that you are trying to bid.