I work in high tech and have been learning about AdWords in a trial by fire way. I have a pretty decent budget and have been fairly successful getting leads for our sales guys through AdWords. However, where I have not been successful is getting quality scores of great. I have lots of goods and one poor (which produces decent CTR and conversions by the way), but I have not had a great QS. Until yesterday. A few weeks ago, I realized that I had done everything I could think of at that time to get my QS and CTR up and thought I would back away and let the ads ride for a while. Everything including the CTR was gradually increasing on its own, albeit a little slower than I would like. Yesterday, for some reason, there was an unusually large number of clicks on one of my key terms. This is an industry niche term and although it always places in the top 4, there are not a lot of impressions, but yesterday I had a very high CTR, which resulted, finally, in a QS of great. Nothing changed otherwise. The point being, first, thank you for all your help. It has been extremely valuable. And second, no matter what you do to your landing pages and keywords in ads and URLs, if the ad does not generate clicks at a rate that will produce a high CTR for your market, then you are hosed. And that gets down to working on figuring what communicates, i.e. good marketing. My two cents.
Then what for Goolge recommends us to optimize our landing pages, ad text, etc.? As far as I know CTR is just one factor that affects QS. If CTR have the largest percentage within QS equation, maybe that is why you got higher QS. BTW, anybody can confirm this. If I only need to have higher CTR just have higher QS, I'll put few cents to achieve a greater QS. So I can get out of being slapped. I hate being bitch of Google. I need more two cents.
I guess what I am trying to say (and not doing a very good job of it) is that my lesson is this: you can do all the technical things Google asks for (optimizing landing page and ad and URL), but if your ad does not produce enough clicks, then you are walking against the wind. And that boils down to knowing your audience and how to effectively communicate to them.