Putting Keywords in URLS - My Experiment

Putting Keywords in URLS - My Experiment

I had a pile of similar keywords but they were not related to the URL of the site and were averaging 7 on the Quality Score. There had been no upward movement in a month so I decided to get another domain and put a similar website there and direct my adwords to that site.
As soon as I made the change my quality scores stayed at 7 and then dropped to 6 the next morning. One week later they went back to 7 and another week later they went to 8!

I hope they will keep going up.

During this time I employed all the same strategies for getting a good quality score and my only change was the domain name!

I hope I can get the scores up to 9s now!

 

Did you see any increase in your clickthrough rates (assuming that your adverts were in the same position).

If searchers think your site is more likely to have what they want, they may be more likely to click on your advert. And a higher clickthrough rate will lead to a better Quality Score...

 

I did something similar about 4 weeks ago after many of my Quality Scores dropped dramatically following the introduction of the new system. However, all I did was introduce keywords into the display urls and for some create new landing pages with similar, although not the same, destination urls, e.g..

Keyword "red widgets"
Original display url "www.somewhere.com" + destination "www.somewhere.com/home.html"
New display url "www.somewhere.com/coloured-widgets" + new destination "www.somewhere.com/multicoloured-plastic-widgets.html"


This was a tactic I had not used before but many posters here and elsewhere suggest it benefits QS and improves CTR. Evidence to date certainly supports the first suggestion and QS improved across the board within days and I now have many 9s and 10s. It worked for all keywords whether I gave them a new landing page or not (those with unchanged landing pages had some element of the keyword in the destination url already.)

But, as for CTR the effect has been minimal and in some cases completely opposite the prediction with the worst cases showing a 50% drop in CTR for all 4 ads I was running in one particular adgroup.

 

I used almost the same ad with the exception of the url it pointed to.
Click through rates appear to be the same.

 

I see so many people saying that GA can be a huge waist of money. I have a new business Im starting and I get so many mixed signals.

 

Half of my keywords went from QS8 to 9 overnight.
This experiment is better than I thought!

 

I've tried the same thing on my adgroups and certainly noticed an improvement...especially when worked in with regular split testing.