I've been advertising for quite some time now on other SE's and whatnot, but just now starting to work my way into Google. I have a keyword I am targetting (which is trademarked), but I am having a problem. My initial quality score is always so low that the ad rarely shows due to quality score. The load time and landing page show up as 'no problem', but the relevance always shows up as 'poor', giving me a QS of 2 or 3. I've read quite a bit on optimizing the LP to make it fit the keyword, but for some reason it isn't working. When I use the W3 Semantic tool, it pulls up my keyword nicely, but when I use Google website keyword finder, Google doesn't find the keyword, eventhough it is in the <title>, <meta>, alt, and all the heading tags (h1, h2, and h3), as well as in descriptions and hyperlinks. The LP is validated as well, and has the basic Privacy/Disclaimer/Terms/Home structure. The landing page seems to be very relevant, as well as the ad (keyword appears in every line and the display URL). What is the problem? I must be missing something obvious, but I can't seem to find it. I was reading that the initial quality score is determined based off how well others as have done, but that doesn't make sense because my ad is rarely shown due to low quality score, and that would mean no new ads could be added since they all perform with a poor initial quality score and can't get any impressions. Thanks in advance. I appreciate any ideas to resolve this problem.
Unfortunately this is a big problem when bidding on trademarked terms, no real way around it, especially as you can't get the trademarked term in your ad to improve CTR and improve QS (I'm in the UK and we can't do that yet - although I think I remember reading you're now allowed to do that in the US?). It's kind of a good system when you think about it - it gives trademark owners that little edge that, to be fair, they deserve as it's their trademark / product etc. It's annoying, but something to deal with - never made huge money bidding on trademarked terms anyway, CTR usually low (although others may have?)
It highly depends on the brand. For some of them you can have very nice ROIs, even if you cant use brand term in your ad copy. Initial QS also depends on market average (at last according to Google managers). To get better QS use a higher bid on the beginning (higher your ad is - better CTR it will have) to build some good history. Depending on search volume it can work after 2 days or 2 weeks but its worth it (ofcourse if you wont have high bounce rate which can destroy your stats anyway). If you will have good CTR you will notice that your average CPC is getting lower and QS eventually will go up.
You can use the trademarked term in your URL, which often increases CTR. If you use the redirect 'trick' you can then have any keyword you want on the end of the display url.