One of my staff just asked me a question, and I had to admit to him that I didn't know the answer He's got a disappointing Quality Score on a keyword that he's bidding on using Phrase Match, but he's got the exact match version as a negative keyword. Since Google uses the Exact Match version of the keyword to assess the clickthrough rate - what is it using here? Anybody investigated this? I can only guess that they put in some kind of a default value, but this keyword has a worse QS than the others in the campaign, and it's difficult to see how to improve it, if the CTR isn't considered... Any thoughts?
it doesn't necessarily use exact match to calculate CTR. It simply knows which keyword triggered your ad and then once clicked adds an extra click to the record of that keyword and then recalculates CTR. I'm not sure about the quality score. I'm thinking that the trouble is that google wants to compare your landing page your keyword to figure out relevancy, but since the exact phrase has been negated it doesn't have anything to compare to and just ends up giving you a poor QS. Sounds like a bug, if it were me, I would contact google about it.
You've confused me there, CustardMite. What do you mean by: " . . . Google uses the Exact Match version of the keyword to assess the clickthrough rate . . ."? Do you mean quality score? What's confused me the most is that, if the exact match version of a particular keyword has been included as a negative, the phrase match version of the same keyword shouldn't trigger any ads. You should be getting a message that says something like: "A negative keyword is preventing ads from being shown for this keyword."
Masterful - negating the exact term would produce the following results. Say the term was 'blue widgets' If we add -[blue widgets] like this, our advert will not appear when someone types 'blue widgets' because its an exact match however, it would appear if someone typed 'clockwork blue widgets' because the search is no longer exactly 'blue widgets'