Hey Guys, I got into PPC for fun about 8 months ago using adwords but I had no idea at that time what I was doing and I was bidding on lots of low CTR keywords, spending tons of money, and getting 0 results. On to my question... I stopped using adwords about 3 months ago and focused on MSN and Yahoo and have been doing real well (Greater than 50% ROI on more than a $100 dollar spend a day). Not to brag but just so you know that I have an idea of what I am doing now. Anyways, I went back to try and use my adwords account to do some PPC campaigns. No matter what I do, or how I do it, I get minimum bids of $1 or $5. Before you respond with quality score bit, take a look at the following. Let’s say I want to sell red widgets. I will get a domain where the url will be red-widgets.com. I will write adcopy that says "get red widgets here; Come get your cheep red widgets here today." And on the landing page that I am pointing the adwords campaign to, I will have some variation of the phrase red widgets in the "title, the keywords, the description, in at least a couple of paragraphs of text, and at least 1 H1 tag and 1 alt image tag. I will also have a privacy policy, site map, contact us page, and a couple of links to reputable sources for info on blue widgets like Wikipedia or something. With all that said, is it possible that my CTR is just so crap from all my other testing before (even though I have deleted all those campaigns) that there is no change to revive this account and make it useful again? Thanks for any insight you might have, Josh
try creating narrowly focused campaigns with a small list of KWs, bid high on those KWs to start with, then slowly lower your bids over time. if you feel you are being punished by G for past deeds, you can always buy your way out of trouble by high bids. i've always found it funny how G can give us lousy Quality Scores and say our pages are worthless, but hey, if we pony up enough money...then suddenly those landing pages look pretty good to them.
ad quality is something that builds up over time. With new campaigns nowadays I am always finding that clicks start off expensive and then decrease in price as a campaign history and ad quality score develops. Having said that, if you're playing with arbitrage or affiliate sales, then you may be better off sticking with Yahoo and MSN because they tend to be a bit cheaper (but without the same exposure)
As stated in the previous posts "time heals all wounds" however if I had time to spend I wouldn't be in this business... PPC is dynamic and you have to keep moving with the trends. Yes, no doubt you could start with high bids and once your CTR steadies you'll be able to lower your bids. Depending on the countries you operate in this can take anywhere between a couple of days (Scandinavian countries for example) and a couple of weeks (UK, US, Germany). My suggestion is just to scrap your existing campaign and open up a new adwords account. It takes 10-30 minutes (depending on the complexity and size of your campaigns) and you don't have to worry about your history and Google will give you a half decent quality score to begin with (due to your optimizing tricks- titles, domain and tags). Regarding the CTR, it varies greatly depending on the field you work in. So when you say crappy CTR, what do you mean? I use the following CTR standards: software is ~1% (can also hit 5% depending on the type of software), ringtones are ~ 5% and if you're selling some well branded products I've personally been able to reach 30% CTR with around 300 clicks per day.
I've read somewhere they do this for legal reasons. If they outright refuse to show certain ads they could be sued for censorship or what have you.
Josh, are you bidding on the same keyterms as you did when your account was performing badly? If not, then I wouldn't bother closing your account and starting a new one. Quality score is calculated on a keyword level, but the quality score for each keyword persists even if you move the keyword to a different campaign. (See here for confirmation of this) If you're bidding on different keywords now, setting up a new account will have no effect on quality score, and will in fact destroy any quality score you have built up for your new keywords.