Lets assume my broad term is : Cat Food For a long time I thought that if I put Cat Food into an Ad group, that people searching for: Affordable Cat Food Cat Food for Ceap etc.etc. Would trigger my ad to pop up. But it no longer seems this way. Why?
It depends on how high your quality score is. The higher your quality score the bigger the net google will cast for you. If your quality score is 2, lets assume, then google does not find you very relevant and therefore does not want you showing up for many terms. So they restrict how many broad variations they will map your too If your quality score is 8, 9 or 10 then google thinks your page is relevant and therefor is going to give you lots more traffic as a reward. So the mappings of keywords are going to be larger. If your QS is low then I recommend a combination of landing page adjustments and text ad adjustments to increase the quality of both
How do I tell what my QS is? Have they changed it? It use to be GOOD, OK and POOR .. where are these numbers?
go to any adgroup and open the keyword tag. Then there is a link that says unhide columns. Unhide the quality score column and you will see the QS. Then click on the magnifying glass to see the QS number between 1 and 10