That's what I was told today by someone who should know better. They claimed the "my contact at Google told me" defense and insisted it's possible to lower a competitors quality score - and not by trying to generate a lot of impressions and lowering their CTR. I disagree and have never seen anything (and I've looked) that leads me to believe someone other than the person running the account has any significant influence over their quality score(s). Your thoughts?
Perhaps with an ad like this: The Site Above This Ad Stinks It's all popups and spam Click It And You Freeze Up. spam-cop.com (woops, initially put the www in front of that url, and it showed as a link, and clicked it and realized somebody was going to make good money off an arbi site... it's not mine btw.) Just kidding, that would actually probably draw more clicks to the competitor's ad. Would like to hear the answers to your question though.
The only thing I can think of is to click every ad but the one you want to have a lower QS. Do this a lot and you'll raise the CTR and thus the QS of every other ad. This way you'll lower your target ad's QS. To avoid detection you should probably switch proxy server and delete cookies between each click. All this could be automated. Of course it would be unethical to do this and probably unprofitable if it involves clicking your own ad.
I think that it makes sense - you would need to run some script to do it per keyword and also you would need to remove the target keyword from your campaign while the script is running or it would hit yourself too. But if Google has already thought about this your impressions will be filtered and it will not work.
Well I dont think google is so foolish, there are much smart people sitting there. Adwords is their bread and butter product and they take it seriously. Like they filter clicks for same IP's they can also filter impressions from same IP's.
I don't think you can, but I would sure like to know if someone has proof that you can! That would definitely be an issue to take up with Google.
gfc- I don't buy it at all. Based on the overall integrity level of the reps I've dealt with, I just can't imagine them saying such a thing.
Neither do I. I never buy the "my contact at Google told me" line and, have worked with AdWords long enough to know it's not that easy to game the system. I was just shocked to see this theory (you can hurt other's QS's) as a cornerstone of a presentation on how to improve PPC.
Like many others even I don’t agree with that because if it was possible to manipulate or lower a competitors quality score most of them would be doing that instead of concentrating more on their own score and that would affect all.
Yes, someone was making a presentation (sales pitch) to me and the foundation of their pitch was the "fact" that other people could have have a huge negative impact on our QS. I'm shocked that misinformation like that circulates freely without anyone ever calling them out on it.
I went to a large online marketing conference last year, and some of the presentations there (SEO/SEM companies presenting to business people and potential clients) were pretty shocking with the half-truths and total nonsense they contained. I've never seen any way to effect a competitors quality score, and frankly would be very surprised if a Google rep would admit there was a way even if there were.
And even if one of them did it means nothing unless they are an insider on the AdWords team. I have a friend that works at State Farm but that doesn't mean he knows a thing about insurance I'm sure with a lot of effort you could screw around a bit with someone's quality score a little (at least CTR)...but the end benefit to you would be next to nothing.
The scary part was it was the technical guy who was going on about it...the sales guy was quiet The misinformation and general lack of understanding of the fundementals in this industry still surprises me.
Yeah, you probably could with a lot of time/work. Maybe mess up their CTR a bit. But for the time, you'd probably be 5x more profitable actually just working on your own stuff, improving your own quality score, etc. And otherwise, CTR is just a part of the QS of course - I bet a worthy competitor who saw their overall ad position slipping for a known profitable campaign would figure out why and combat it... It doesn't take much to optimize your page a bit to make your QS go from OK to Great... or just raise your bid a few cents. Sounds like another clever myth to burn up some bored (and slight mischievous) people's time. -T