Adwords: How does QS drop overnight?

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mstef

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Dec 11, 2008
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I just started using adwords and am having some trouble and confusion. I have two full content sites, PR 4 and 2, that I'm running small test campaigns for. I loaded up a billion keywords for each and set the appropriate bids, etc. Everything is fine, until the next day. The QS drops from 7-8 to 2-4 for most, not all, of the keywords. Then 80% of the keywords say the front page bid more than doubled, etc. The articles and pages of the site are loaded with the keywords chosen, both in content and meta tagged.

What's the deal?
 


And for a majority of the keywords that still have a QS of 7, it says

Ad Showing?: No. Although your ad is showing, its rank is not high enough to place it on the first page of search results.

Yet it says average position is 2-4 and there is no warning that I need to increase my bid.
 
Maybe you are too broad in your kw list?

A Billion?

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If you have a billion kws, chances of you mixing up the kws in all sorts of adgroups is very likely. Tightly group (cliche) your kws.
ie. blue widgets (adgroup) -> new blue widgets, cool blue widgets, old blue widgets. You dont want to add new widgets, and old widgets to that same adgroup, that will mess with your qs.
 
Thanks - I was worried about that but figured google would sort it out automatically.
 
I narrowed my 200 kw's of broads, phrases, and exacts to 12 small phrases and a load of negatives. Also juiced up the landing page with more original keyword loaded content. Lets see if things change at all..
 
I narrowed my 200 kw's of broads, phrases, and exacts to 12 small phrases and a load of negatives. Also juiced up the landing page with more original keyword loaded content. Lets see if things change at all..

They wont change overnight. make sure you also have your ctr pretty high.
 
I didn't realize that QS reflected on how close the AD text was to your keywords (stupid me). I created like 15 different ad variations - Google will pick the highest QS ad's automatically right? Or do I have to create a different ad group?
 
Nothing dropped.

When you first add keywords, Google will assign a temporary Quality Score. But as soon as traffic is driven to the keywords, a more thorough analyze will be done, and your real Quality Score will then be shown. Which actually takes 1 day, as in your case.

So really the accurate Quality Score for your keywords is between 2-4.
 
rgordon83: the CTR is minimal. i've changed the keywords/adgroups over and over again trying to achieve something. how am i supposed to get any CTR is the QS fluctuations are causing almost no impressions?

the links on the page are redirected so they look like internal links (not sure if google can tell). there are also nav and footer links on the page, etc. i just dont understand how the QS goes up and down constantly. a bid for $1/ppc is fine for the front page. then 30 minutes later its at $2..then 6 hours later its at 5.50. then 9. the QS is back to 7 then 2. now no impressions. theres something i'm missing.
 
all i can say is your wasting your time making a billion keywords. I never understood this longtail keyword thing. Ok you make 10,000 longtail keywords that get you a total of 100 clicks a month. Really? I mean i guess if thats your goal. Unfortunately my advice is to concentrate on monteizing high volume kewords with little ad competition by thinking outside of the box.
 
all i can say is your wasting your time making a billion keywords. I never understood this longtail keyword thing. Ok you make 10,000 longtail keywords that get you a total of 100 clicks a month. Really? I mean i guess if thats your goal. Unfortunately my advice is to concentrate on monteizing high volume kewords with little ad competition by thinking outside of the box.

i am totally with you on this. its far easier to manage as well.
less work with more profit is good.
 
rgordon83: the CTR is minimal. i've changed the keywords/adgroups over and over again trying to achieve something. how am i supposed to get any CTR is the QS fluctuations are causing almost no impressions?

the links on the page are redirected so they look like internal links (not sure if google can tell). there are also nav and footer links on the page, etc. i just dont understand how the QS goes up and down constantly. a bid for $1/ppc is fine for the front page. then 30 minutes later its at $2..then 6 hours later its at 5.50. then 9. the QS is back to 7 then 2. now no impressions. theres something i'm missing.

Yah, i actually had the same issue last week. I had a project with one general campaign and 20 campaigns targeting cities and stuff. Si i uploaded the main campaign first and then the min bids were $1.50 for front page. Then i started uploading the other 20 campaigns.

Next thing i know the general campaign had min bids of $4.00. But my QS qas 7/10. And i couldn't mess with the account b/c the upload was taking 2 days. So i raised my bid to $4.00 to see if it would make a diff so i could improve my QS. Then they raised bids to $6.00. So i matched. Then $.725

So i called them to see wtf was going on. They gave me some long bullshit answer about breaking out ad groups and this and that. So i showed them my account and how i only had 1 KW in each ad group. And they changed to some other BS.

Sometimes google is full of shit. Actually all the time. But most of the time i can get around it. This time i had no idea what else to do. I just stopped the offer for other reasons anyway.
 
Hope so. never pictured adwords being this irrational and complicated. seems pretty hard to turn a profit paying that much for clicks. also seems pretty damm hard getting clicks with things changing every 15 minutes.
 
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