Your Landing Page Is Below Average



Start pausing the worst (CTR) keywords. You cannot let that run. It will kill your keywords, then ad groups then campaigns QS and history.

Anything less than 2% CTR in search needs work.

Sounds like bots or something. Sort by Impressions and pause the worst ones at the top.
 
Unless you are bidding on very high volume exact match keywords, you are very likely losing out on a ton of volume.

You should typically start campaigns with broad match or modified broad, add a shiton of negs, and then isolate your best keywords moving forward.

As others have said, send your traffic to the appropriate landing pages. Sending your traffic to the homepage is a disaster.

Your competitor is an idiot.

Your qs is suffering in part BECAUSE you are sending all of your traffic to the homepage.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2
 
Unless you are bidding on very high volume exact match keywords, you are very likely losing out on a ton of volume.

You should typically start campaigns with broad match or modified broad, add a shiton of negs, and then isolate your best keywords moving forward.

As others have said, send your traffic to the appropriate landing pages. Sending your traffic to the homepage is a disaster.

Your competitor is an idiot.

Your qs is suffering in part BECAUSE you are sending all of your traffic to the homepage.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2

This is already a very targeted campaign targeting a specific manufacturer and product.

As far as I can determine, my competitor puts a redirect url into his ads, which then redirect to his homepage.

Example:

Blue Diapers!
Free Shipping!
www.mysite.com/blue-diapers

...where mysite.com/blue-diapers redirects to mysite.com
------------------------------

He might be an idiot, but he's been dropping $X,XXX a month for at least a year and he's at #1 or #2 for his PPC keywords, so he's clearly generating some profit.

There are only 22 keywords in this campaign. Only 4 or 5 of them have any significant traffic.

I realize that the CTR is horrendous and that I should be aiming for 1 or 2%.

As high as I'm bidding, however, Google keeps my Avg. POS at 4 or higher.

There was a brief stretch where the Avg. POS declined from 6, down to 5, down to 4, then the momentum changed and it started a slow climb all the way from 4.7 to 6.3 over the course of a couple days, etc... At that point, I paused the campaign.

I think that my atrocious QS is a combination of my low CTR and my landing page relevance.

The main reason I paused the campaign, however, is because the CRE Loaded template I'm using has made it very difficult for me to install proper tracking.

So I will be destroying the entire site, building a Magento site from scratch, and restarting the entire campaign branching out to broad match as well. I briefly looked at Shopify, but they don't even give you a decent design for the monthly fee and transaction fee they're taking, so there's no shot of that happening.

Hopefully it goes a little better, although I know Google can punish new campaigns based on the performances of old ones.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

These was the final stats for this short-lived and doomed campaign:

Imp: 4,667
Clicks: 6
CTR: .13%
Avg. POS: 5.4
 
In that case you better have to make a full analysis of how does your competitors do on their Landing Page Structure, you may have to fill in the meta tags/keywords. If you feel everything is set then go start your campaign.
 
Blue Diapers!
Free Shipping!
www.mysite.com/blue-diapers

...where mysite.com/blue-diapers redirects to mysite.com

He's doing it right. Crafting a good display URL improves CTR.
As high as I'm bidding, however, Google keeps my Avg. POS at 4 or higher.

There was a brief stretch where the Avg. POS declined from 6, down to 5, down to 4, then the momentum changed and it started a slow climb all the way from 4.7 to 6.3 over the course of a couple days, etc... At that point, I paused the campaign.

I think that my atrocious QS is a combination of my low CTR and my landing page relevance.

Ads are entered into every action based on Adrank, which is maxCPC x QS.

Because your QSs are so low, increasing your bids will only increase your avg. position so much(and your CPCs will be outrageous.) This is Google's way of forcing you to improve your quality scores in order for your average positions to improve.
 
^^ Thanks for posting so many PPC tips in this thread and others.

It's greatly appreciated.
 
Was it a new campaign?

I had bad quality scores because of below average LP experience in newly created ad groups although I was sure that my LP was better than my competitors one.

This was for an ecommerce store as well, running on Magento. Traffic sent directly to the product page. Product page template highly CR optimized and split-tested. I'm always amazed how theme designers have no f*cking clue about conversion optimization (and SEO btw), yet selling ecommerce themes is their bread and butter.

Content and product images were also better than my competition's.

So I just upped the bids and let the campaign run. After a couple of days the QS was good.
 
Was it a new campaign?

Yes, brand new campaign. Brand new Adwords account.

I had bad quality scores because of below average LP experience in newly created ad groups although I was sure that my LP was better than my competitors one.

So I just upped the bids and let the campaign run. After a couple of days the QS was good.

You didn't mention your CTR in that experience. That was the main Achilles heel in this particular campaign. I upped my bids to as much as $2 a click on certain keywords, let it run for roughly 6 days, and like I mentioned, that could only pull the Avg. POS as low as 4 before it shot back up again.

Sometimes it seems like a case of the chicken and the egg, by Google crippling your Avg. POS, they affect your CTR. Then they affect your QS based on your CTR, which affects your Avg. POS, and so on and on in an eternal loop.

I'm currently redesigning the entire site in Magento and will be relaunching the campaign once it's complete.

I have had problems in the past with Adwords, but this is a product and niche that I am very committed to, so I am determined to make this campaign work until I run out of money. I'll be posting my results here or in a new thread when I relaunch it so that maybe other people can be helped.
 
Yes, brand new campaign. Brand new Adwords account.



You didn't mention your CTR in that experience. That was the main Achilles heel in this particular campaign. I upped my bids to as much as $2 a click on certain keywords, let it run for roughly 6 days, and like I mentioned, that could only pull the Avg. POS as low as 4 before it shot back up again.

Sometimes it seems like a case of the chicken and the egg, by Google crippling your Avg. POS, they affect your CTR. Then they affect your QS based on your CTR, which affects your Avg. POS, and so on and on in an eternal loop.

I'm currently redesigning the entire site in Magento and will be relaunching the campaign once it's complete.

I have had problems in the past with Adwords, but this is a product and niche that I am very committed to, so I am determined to make this campaign work until I run out of money. I'll be posting my results here or in a new thread when I relaunch it so that maybe other people can be helped.

Keep testing man you will get it and cant wait for the thread GL
 
I can help you solve the QS problem on Adwerdz.
PM me your Skype becuase it will take some time