The more I use Adwords the more I am beginning to figure out that a revelent ad and a revelent landing page will at best only give you a quality score of 7 if you don't yet have any CTR (click through rate) history for a new ad you have created. Even if you have your main keyword in your campaign title, in your ad title, and in the description, and even in the display url, and also several times on the landing page - including a h1 tag, h2 tag and h3 tag...and have it mentioned about a dozen times on the landing page etc. Your ad quality score will still only be 7 at best (correct me if I am wrong). Once you start getting clicks on the ad if the ctr is poor (such as when you get 5000 impressions, but only 1 click) this will cause your ad quality score to decrese to a 6 or 5 or even lower even though the ad and landing page are revelent. The key to getting a quality score of 8, 9, or 10, and also getting a lower cost per click, is to create a revelent, but attractively worded ad that people will click on. This will eventually build you a good ctr history that has a high percentage. Eventually your quality score will move to a 8, and eventually a 9 or 10 if the ctr history continues to improve, and you might even drop to paying only .05 per click, and your ad might make it to the top position for only 5 cents per click, and someone else might be paying $1 per click whose ad is below yours because they don't have a ctr history that is as good as yours. Please correct me if I am wrong in any of this.
You must understand that 25% of the score is keyword relevancy and 65% your click rate. Adwords thinks your keywords are relevant? That's great. Now work on increasing that CTR. So basically you are right. Doesn't mean however that when once you were paying $1 that you'll now pay five cents. Download Adwords FAQ for more details.
You can get a quality score of 10 from the get go without a CTR history for the ad. You'll need an exact match between the keyword, ad text, and landing page.
Matching the keywords with meta tags helps a lot to increase the QS. But please, dont stuff keywords...
There are rules, although not always obvious. One thing Google claims is that the QS for the same keyword in different matches will have the same QS. If I recall, only the broad match is used in the calculation. I have not noticed this so I kind of doubt it in experience and in knowing a thing or two about databases. But to calculate the initial QS of a new keyword, this would make sense. There are also other factors in initial QS taken into consideration. Your creative may be compared somewhat to others. Not perfect, that's why you will see large changes in QS in a few hours. Just today, most keywords of a new campaign got a 5. After a few hours of getting impressions and clicks, most went up to 7. As the campaign matures, the QS will not shift as much and certainly won't once I find the ad that gets a 10.
From your experience it sounds about right; Google starts new ads around 7/10 by default and then lets your ad/copy/landing page determine the rolling QS. Though advertising on Adwords back in early 2000 was easier because you could bid as low as you wanted as long as you were happy with a low impressions. Now it seems if you bid low your QS falls off a cliff unless you jump your bids to high 1st page spots.
Does anybody have experience with special software that automatically generates a landing page for each keyword phrase, so the exact targeting brings them up to a 10?
Yes I believe that's exactly what it did- though im having trouble finding the ad/page where i saw this service advertised... I do recall them saying they take a manual process of creating a seperate landing page for all 200 of your words (or phrases) and then automatically do so with their software... Thanks!
The principles are the same now than they were ten years ago. QS has existed in some form since the beginning. They just didn't call it QS, it was pure CTR. Google simply expanded and refined that concept of quality as measured by CTR. You can still bid anything you want, just as in the "old days" and your ads are still measured by their quality which affect your ranking and cost just as it did then. As for software that creates a landing page and guaranteeing a perfect QS, there's no such thing. Because QS is heavily influenced by CTR. I would stay clear of such things. For one, I doubt such software can create a good selling page for every product. Remember that you are trying to sell to people, not computers.
The best shot you have of hitting a 10/10 QS is by increasing your CTR as mentioned before, the way I to do this is create very tightly grouped adgroups with only a handful of very relevant keywords in each. Then tailor different copy for each adgroup... making sure to add the main keyword from the adgroup in the copy This will make your copy highly relevant to the particular keywords in each adgroup and will lead to a higher CTR. your account history plays a large part aswell, have a look at all the kws that have had high impressions and no clicks in your account and pause those kw's ... this will give your entire account a higher average CTR and help overall to increase your average position at lower cpc's...