Hi folks. Two days ago I made a rookie mistake. I launched an AdGroup with a large number of longish tail keywords. However, the keyword combination tool I was using made an error and included uncombined terms as well. I did not catch this, and as a result I accidentally went live aggressively bidding on keywords like "Canada", "Canadian", and "Toronto". Needless to say, in the half-hour or less before I caught the mistake I had registered 71K impressions, with a CTR less than 0.01%. I don't care about the $50 this cost me - the price for learning a valuable lesson. What scares me is the impact on my quality scores. Since I am targeting a niche Canadian market with a tightly focused PPC strategy, the sum total of all impressions I had received before this was only 90K, achieving a CTR of over 3%. My question - will this massive burst of worthless impressions pull down all my quality scores, since it represents such a large percentage of the total traffic I have generated to this point? One last fact is that my disastrous AdGroup was in a separate campaign from my other active AdGroups. So the 71K of worthless traffic was generated in a separate campaign than the 90K of high quality traffic. Any insight on the impact of this worthless traffic on my quality scores would be greatly appreciated. George
Just drop those keywords. QS is calculated on individual keywords. Obviously, you had poor and irrelevant keywords and the QS on them is going to reflect that. But it won't affect the QS on the other keywords in the group or even a campaign or your account.
Thanks - that is great news. I thought I had read recently that one of the factors going into individual quality scores was some sort of evaluation of an account's overall (average?) quality score. So I guess my understanding was wrong - the factors related to a particular keyword QS are unique to that keyword, and have nothing to do with activity elsewhere in your account?
I did a quick bit of research, and it is information like the following that scares me: "If you advertise on the search network, Google lists the following factors as being instrumental in calculating your ad’s Quality Score: • The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on the Google domain • Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account • The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group • The quality of your landing page • The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group • The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query • Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown" (Sourced from: http://www.singlegrain.com/blog/how-the-google-adwords-quality-score-works/) So from your reply, would it be fair to say that you feel that the account history plays a minor role in determining individual quality scores? George
Does anyone know approximately how much this account history might count for? Because if I average my historical CTR (> 3% CTR x 90K impressions) with the (>0.01 CTR x 71K impressions) that I mistakenly generated in less than an hour then I've almost halved my account's historical CTR. More than a little depressing. Thanks, George
Cannot say for sure.. How about talking to Adwrods support guys and ask for recommendations ? IF you dont have access to phone support I can do that for you..add me on skype.
I took your advice and talked with an AdWords support person today about the impact of my mistake. He sympathized with my mistake, and informed me there was nothing he could do from his end to purge it from my account records. He did advise me that he did not think it would have much of an impact, because: A) my account had had an excellent CTR until then, and B) he said the use of account history in calculating QS was heavily weighed towards recent history. My only option to clear the mistake off my account would be to start again with a new account, losing any progress on QS I had made in my existing campaigns. Unless I see a big hit to my QS over the next while, I am going to plow ahead with my existing account, hoping the support person's advice was on the money. As a side bar, I have asked various AdWords support people some fairly specific technical questions at different times over the last six months, and I never get a satisfying answer. Is it because A) they know the answers, but don't give out details of things like how account history is incorporated into QS calcuations, or B) they don't know any better than someone who does some thorough research on the subject online? Thanks for the advice to wtg and Lucid Web Marketing. George
As mentioned in other post, I know about the line you highlighted and many like wtg repeat it. But, I see no evidence there's a large weight put on this. Reason is, I've taken groups and whole accounts from QS in the 2 to 4 range and brought them up to 7 and even 10s in a matter of days. If the QS of other keywords did indeed drag down the new QS of my revamped campaign, how did I manage to resurrect the campaign? Ergo, I just don't believe that line. It may be that in Googlespeak, it means something else, although it does seem pretty clear so we can assume it's true. Just that the weight is very small. So small that I can't measure it. Also, think about it, it doesn't make any sense. Where's the logic if you sell many different items (say like one client children's shoes and pajamas) where one poor campaign for shoes has a huge effect on the campaign for pajamas? It's two different things. Anyway, plow ahead, don't worry about that mistake because there's no point for one thing. Keep improving. Learn more with my Adwords FAQ.
I've just spent the morning looking through the Lucid Web Marketing Adwords FAQ (see link in the previous post). It is good stuff. I learned a bunch, even though I thought I had a pretty good grasp on the fundamentals. Worth looking over. Cheers, George
Each keyword have its own quality score,so it does not make any change to the old keywords.You can delete the new ones anytime that have bad quality score.
Just drop those keywords. QS is calculated on individual keywords. Obviously, you had poor and irrelevant keywords and the QS on them is going to reflect that. But it won't affect the QS on the other keywords in the group or even a campaign or your account.