Right now in my campaign, in both ad groups i'm trying to build up the QS on, there seems to be a troublemaker keyword, but it's the 'exact match' version of a simple term. In both campaigns I see something like this ... "blue widgets" - 2 clicks - 6 imps - 33% CTR [blue widgets] - 1 click - 170 imps - 0.58% CTR That second keyword is clearly ruining the CTR of my ad group, but if I delete it, won't the impressions start going to "blue widgets"? If I leave it, does that one keyword hurt the entire group as far as quality score? Thanks!
I'm assuming you have both keywords in as part of the same Ad Group? If so - separate them. Have 2 adgroups instead, with "blue widgets" in one of them and [blue widgets] in the other. In your above example [blue widgets] has a poor CTR, but what's it's average position? How many ads do you have set up in the ad group? Could natural google listings be more inviting, so people are ignoring the adwords listings, most of the time? If you do delete [blue widgets], whenever someone searches for that exactly, the phrase match will be triggered instead (unless you add negative exact)
So it is possible that [blue widgets] could be bringing down the entire ad group regarding QS? I'll definitely put it in it's own ad group. I also have the same trouble with [red widgets], so I may make an ad group for that too, or just put it in the group with blue
I don't think it brings down other keywords Quality Score, but it makes it hard work trying to determining which ads are working best/worst with which keyword - hence why I have keywords in their own adgroup unless, they produce next to zero impressions. Clustering (putting [red widgets] in with [blue widgets] as you mention .. I'd only do that if they were hardly getting any impressions. If they get impressions, produce an adgroup for each keyword. That's my view anyway, some will agree some will disagree. You can't get more optimised than 1 to 1 (1 keyword to each Ad Group), and that's how I like it.