Just curious my campaign(s) were running great for one niche, but then all suddenly all my QS go from GREAT to OK then it put me on the 2nd page. I don't see how that could of happen all suddenly? Seems to be Google manually edits your score to whatever they think is best I might be wrong, but what do you do when this happens just bid back up and get the QS back and start bidding back down?
That is not a google slap, that is just a poor performing campaign. A slap is $5 and $10 minimum bids of which is obviously way to expensive to bid on. look at the QS recommendation from Google on each of the keywords. Most likely is just poor performing text ads. Write better ones and things should improve
well my campaign is profiting right now at 100 percent this has happen once before on another campaign and I just bidded up then my qs scores went back up to great and they've been like that every since. I don't know I'm going to let it run for about ~5 days before I touch it becuase its a new campaign. Can a new campaign / keyword list go back and forth from ok to great? Until it collects a lot of data? That what my other campaign did it would bounce back and forth for awhile and I never touched it, but now all my scores are reading great across the board on a daily bases...
QS can change at anytime: source: http://www.ppcdiscussions.com/2008/03/adwords-quality-score-faq.html
I would have to say that Google is giving some of us the slap. I had a keyword which was receiving 100K + impressions / day and averaged a .03 - .04 cpc. This ad group is placement targeted and only consists of image ads. The image ads are highly targeted to the landing page and the landing page specific for that offer. The 2nd ad group was for Google search network. My QS was Great and clicks were, again, .03 - .04 cpc. Everything was fine, until my payment declined. Somehow my bank declined my payment and Google was forced to stop showing my ads. During the time my ad's were down (waiting for Google to clear the invoice after payment), I decided I wanted to track my inbound clicks. I added a simple querystring to the landing url on each one of my ad's. I know this causes another manual review, anything you change does, but I did not know it would cause this. After I changed the URL's, my ad's for the content network were re-approved within 48 hours. After this approval, everything went nuts. I cannot generate impressions on the content network for less than .25 cpc and if I try to create an ad group for search with 5 specific narrow match keywords, the CPC is btwn 5.00 and 10.00. I am baffeled... and my cheek kinda hurts. Thanks Google.
YEa odd.. What's funny I have high traffic keywords that are converting, but Google put a poor quality score on them when there is only 3 other ads on the page for certain keywords. Made me feel like there laughing like haha you thought you was going to exploit that market with cheap clicks. I'm running a few test on all my ads now a/b testing them over and collecting more clicks seems to be the more clicks you buy eventually you start to get them cheaper over time as long as you keep your QS up to great.
** If I am thread jacking, I am terribly sorry. We are experiencing the same situation (seemingly) and I hope to bring more info to this post.** On the same note, I just noticed one more thing. Google has finally given me a clue as to the underlying problem. My QS from Adwords analysis states: "This keyword isn't highly relevant. Based on the keyword's relevance to the associated ad text, CTR, historical keyword usage, and other performance factors Landing Page and Load Time: No Problems Found" The keywords are narrow match and highly relevant. There are only 4 total keywords and the landing page is all about those keywords. I have even went as far as to create lengthy, informative articles about each keyword on seperate pages on the landing site. I will partially rule out relevance CTR is above 3% on the Search Network, but most of my clicks are coming from the content network. I am working in a high volume content atmosphere, so I will see 100K impressions to my 1500 clicks. I am not sure if that is affecting CTR, but again, the slap happened with the campaign live for only 2 days. I am not sure how much CTR data Google could generate in 48 hours. Other Performance Factors! A little general Google? I have read that the "bounce rate" for Google is measured in about 5 second intervals. Meaning that if a visitor is active on a site for longer than 5 seconds, it is recorded as a visitor. From my stats, and using a ratio, 463:500 visitors to my site end up leaving through the channels I provide (my funnel). The other 37 either go back or close the browser. That would mean I have a 92% CTR from my landing page to the destination. ( I worked hard for that). Now, looking at my user stats: 62% of users are gone within 5 seconds, 16% from 5 - 30 seconds and the remaining 30 seconds - 5 minutes. If Google is factoring in bounce rate, and my visitors are leaving (not bouncing) within 5 seconds, would this impact my QS so heavily? Your thoughts please!
you guys are probably experiencing a few things While you may think your site is optimized and highly relevant, you really need to understand what google wants by relevant. Relevance is not simply talking about the subject on hand. This means that bidding on dog leash does not mean having a LP on dog leashes (VS sending them to a ring tones LP) will guarantee a good quality score. Google also looks at the theme of the page, the setup, the navigation, the messaging, the offer and also how clear and straight forward your offer is. If you bid on dog leash, and then send visitors to a long lengthy article talking about dog leashes with no easily definable marketing message, you can still get a bad QS. Relevance is not just about how much text or even providing good quality info. Its about many factors. Many times I find the error can be bad messaging. When someone visits your landing page, what is the offer being presented at hand, and is this message clear and easily understandable within seconds. Or is the offer hidden, and unnoticeable, with long lengthy (probably boring) text sales message. Many of my best landing pages are 90% images, contain very little text and only include a form to fill out. But, the message is clear. Sign up today, or Buy Now, or This will solve This Problem... Many times in a big bold image. Messaging is clear and the visitors know what to do. Either buy or sign up Take a step back and evaluate your site again from a visitors prospective and from googles prospective. Is your site boring and hard to understand, or is it alive and clear precise messaging...
This is such a a great forum. You make very good points in your post, some which have made me re-evaluate other landing pages for seperate projects! I am assuming the AdWords bot searches your landing page for keyword relevance when you create the ad. The landing page is basically 6 graphical choices, the only 6 choices a visitor would need. It also has a small paragraph about the jist of the site... but this is just there to satisfy the Adwords bot. I dont need text, but Google seems to require it. The navigation images are clearly labeled and the first thing the eye see's when the page is loaded. I have added 2 more static pages with text / information about the things I promote. These are linked to from the entire site but are not the landing page for my ppc ad's. I was hoping a few more cached pages wouldnt hurt... concidering I saw 1 Adsense employee / bot and 1 Google employee / bot doing a site: command yesterday... thats a whole 'nother topic. Now, one thing that may be leading to a problem. I have sub-nav links on the site that point to a url like such http://www.mysite.com/red-widgets/here.html but when that url is hit, it redirects to the conversion offer. Obviously this is for affiliate intent. Could this cause an issue? I have seen it done time and time again to hide dirty links, affiliate id's and to track outbound links. I cannot say that the end result (my conversion) is something that a person would "need", but it is what they are searching for and ultimately what they want. Relevance to me is a person finding what they were searching for. I provide ad's about "widgets", my page is about "blue widgets", "red widgets" and "widgets" itself. The conversion page that my LP sends you to is about each certain "widget" I promote. I do say that my entire chain of events is very relevant to the next. What people are looking for in my niche requires NO text or schpeal (sp?). They know what they want, I show them where to find it. I understand using a CPM model vs a CPC will eliminate the landing page as a cause of poor QS. I have also tried this approach. The campaign has been active since 5-6-08 and not 1 impression. Im using Google's recomendation as to what CPM to use.... and im sure thats fairly generous! =)
once again, what you feel is relevant and ultimately what the visitor finds relevant, unfortunately is irrelevant to google. I have seen many times, great websites, full of info, and a great service, but get slapped because messaging is not clear. Why is it not clear? Because the website is offering nothing more than information, which creates a loyal repeat visitor, but again, messaging is unclear and Google dislikes that. Secondly, off site and other cached pages has not been proven to increase or decrease the performance of any campaign. It makes no difference. A 1 page site can perform just as well as a 1 million page site. It depends if you message is clear, you meet all of googles guidelines and optimize your campaign for performance, based on their rules, not what you think visitors want. I hope this helps But main point, is it doesn't matter how relevant you think your pages are. Even if the visitors buy the product. Even if you have a 99& conversion ratio. If Google does not like the way you set it up, they will make things difficult.
i'm having the same problem. it took me more than a week to find that keyword and i was happy and then google made the keyword hard to bid.