I have an Ad Group in my account called Widgets (Broad) which has widgets in it, in it's broad term; and another Ad Group called Widgets (Exact) with, funnily enough [widgets] in. The one in the Broad Ad Group has a min CPC of 0.05 but the one in the Exact Ad Group is 0.03! I thought QS was the same for the same keyword? Not here it isn't! Any advice as it's confused me a little.
They have different quality scores. Different CTR = different quality score = different minimum bid. Other things could be coming into play as well but from the info you've provided that's my guess.
Ok guys, cheers for the reply. It'll be something I read and misunderstood. I'm thinking it will be down to the Ads, as the Ad Groups which have all 3 match types in, have the same QS and exact same min CPC.
Are you guys sure about that? I've never seen the minimum bid vary for different versions of the same keyword - probably because it's only the exact-match version that's used when calculating the QS. If you can see a number of cases where you've got different Quality Scores with the same advert (obviously if they have different adverts and are in different adgroups their QS will be different), then I'd be a little surprised - it's never happened to me, regardless of their overall clickthrough rates...
I always thought that quality score was taken into account ONLY when the keyword was typed in exactly. So blue widget wud only have a change of QS when people searched for Blue Widget exactly ... not Big Blue Widget.... which is why I was a little confused when I noticed they were different. When I put them in the same Ad Group there is no difference - it's only when I have them in different Ad Groups and these Ad Groups vary slightly in their Ads. I've also noticed today that yesterday they were different - so I placed the same Ad from [widgets] Ad Group... over to Widgets Ad Group and today they are now the same! Which to me, suggests it was because they had different quality Ads in their Ad Group.
I've never seen a difference. My guess would be that they were mid-way through updating your QS's when you looked at the numbers...
Yes, I'm sure. The OP mentioned the keywords were in different ad groups so that's likely the reason for the differing quality scores. I would assume if you have all 3 versions of a keyword in the same ad group (which I don't think is a good idea but that's a different discussion) they would have the same quality score for the reasons you mentioned.