Increasing Quality Score

Hello

Just out of curiosity, what type of CTR do you need in order for your quality score to improve to the point that your CPC becomes reasonable again?

When I first started Adwords, I had no clue about ad writing. Therefore, my QS dropped immensely. Now however, my ads have been doing alot better, around 0.5% CTR. But my QS is still unreasonably high - it wants me to pay either $1.24 or $6.38 for all my keywords, and this makes it nearly impossible to operate. Especially considering I was paying $0.15 originally.

Thanks for any help.

 

I belive your CTR should be at least 1.0 - the higher, the better. I've observed that Smartpricing can be updated as quickly as one week, so once you hit 1.0, it may be a week before you see a change.

No Guarantees, YMMV. Remember that price is complex and there may be other issues, such as a new player bidding against you as well.

There are improvements you can do beyond improving ad quality, such as using smaller adgroups and ruthlessly pruning underperforming keywords. These have a tremendous effect on overall CTR and price as well.

 

Hmmm... I doubt I can get a CTR as high as that, since I advertise in search only. I suspect I get ripped off in content placements - while my search clicks give me 70%+ conversions, my content clicks have never given me *any* conversions.

With search, people are looking at the search result, not the ads way off to the right. I have never seen CTRs of 1.0 in search...

 

I see CTR for search campaigns above 30% all the time. 1% is pretty poor, and 0.5% is very poor imo.

 

Hmmmm.... What can I do to optimize my ads then? I've done everything I can according to the Google's suggestions....

 

Are you using broad match?

 

Seperate your keywords out into several groups, and write a custom ad for each group.

Use keyword insertion where appplicable.

search for more alternative keywords/keyphrases, including misspellings.

every keyword should be used as singular and plural.

for every keyword, use:
keyword
[keyword]
"keyword"

Pare out the underperforming keywords. you might try putting your best performing keywords into one adgroup, if they fit thematically enough to share a single ad.

It is an iterative process, keep your daily max low until you have a handle on the CTR. Don't let Google set the bid for you, and don't bother paying for the #1 slot.

 

I'm in a position somewhat similar to the original poster...I created a crummy ad for one of my sites and then let it run for a week with very poor CTR. Now the minimum bids for Search are several dollars.

Is there a way to "erase the past" and start over, this time using better ads and quickly deleting the non-performing ones? Does Google ever forget stupidity?