A friend of mine recently started as the SEO and SEM specialist for this (mid-sized) company and it seems that their PPC campaigns had been in need of reworking and fine-tuning (for best CPA and CPC of course), but something really strange happened in the process. My friend was just about to start really putting their plan into motion, when all of the sudden - from one day to the next - the quality score on EVERY campaign they had running dropped to the absolute bottom! The day prior she had just finished one particular landing page and it started converting like crazy which in turn - seemed to deplete the PPC budget a little too quickly. The next day they went into look at their campaign and BAM 0-2 out of 10 quality scores on that campaign too! It turns out that the company's credit card had been declined for payment and as soon as it was the quality score dropped. Are they connected? I've never seen this before (I guess my bills are always paid lol), but it seems rather strange that your 'billing' might also have something to do with your QS. Just another thought Any feedback?
Here's a little info and what happens. The main component of quality score is your CTR. When you start a new ad, Google doesn't know what the CTR will be. It therefore makes a few assumptions and calculations. Since this is a computer algorithm, it's not perfect. I myself recently ran into this imperfections a few weeks ago for a new client's campaign. All the QS were 1 and it was WTH? A quick call resolved this. The opposite is also true. A high QS can turn into an average or, as in your case, poor quality. It's just that the system now has more information to go on. Two things to remember about QS. First, it is always being re-evaluated. Google says after every search of your keyword. Second, it is a relative value calculated among all advertisers of a keyword and normalized by position. In other words, it can go up and down. This will depend not only on your own metrics but also those of your competitors. If their QS goes up, someone's will go down and vice versa. The number of advertisers will also have an effect as they come and go. Billing has nothing to do with it.
Yea I wouldn't have thought so, but the timing was just weird. As it turns out moving the campaigns to another domain fixed her problem. Perhaps there was something flaky with the landing page's domain. I know how QS works, but you should never NOT discuss such things since NONE of us really know exactly what Google is doing behind their doors I doubt that it has to do with billing (timing was a coincidence I'm sure), but if we all 'talk' about things like this we can slowly begin to figure out more and more about the inner workings of the big G with regards to SEO and SEM. Let's never dismiss 'anything' guys
YEP EXACTLY. Their bids went so high my friend almost got fired over it. I just heard that there was a spam email using 'their' info on it. I wonder if that might have had something to do with it....