Adwords quality score won't go past 3 or 4?

cheesewhiz

New member
May 1, 2010
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Hey all,

I'm running an Adwords campaign for a friend's carpet cleaning business. The campaign has been running for a week now, but I can't get the quality score for any of my keywords above a 4.

I started out with only 1 adgroup with 10 keywords that are basically the same keyword but different exact matches of it, so my adgroup is really tight. I have tested 5 ads so far, and one is a pretty clear winner. The CTR on that ad is ~3-4%. I've dumped the other ads. I'd like to test out more but thought that might be causing the low QS.

I think my landing page is fine. I've got the key phrase in the title, h1, h2, and h3 tags, in the meta keywords and description, and about 400 words of unique content on the page with the key phrase sprinkled in a few times. The keywords are in the domain name. I renamed the images and changed the alt text to include the keywords.

The site is a fully built out website for a local business with 6-7 pages of unique related content and privacy policy and sitemap, and a blog with a couple of lengthy posts of solid, unique content. The landing page/entire website are EXACTLY what searchers are looking for.

Any idea why my QS is a 3 or 4 for all 10 of my keywords? I haven't run anything on Adwords in about a year, but I remember back then having no trouble getting 7-10 QS for dozens/hundreds of related KW's at a time.

Thanks for anyone who might be able to push me in the right direction.

Some boobs for the help:

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Sounds good overall.

Was there ever Adwords traffic sent to this site?

Did it ever get hacked?

Who's account are you using? Does it have a history?

Is he doing anything shady on the site at all? Asking for personal data to get prices etc? Is the content unique and pass copyscape?

GL - Lately Adwords is a pain in the ass even for real businesses.
 
Was there ever Adwords traffic sent to this site?
Who's account are you using? Does it have a history?

That might be it, you could have a fucked up history on it. Once someone screws you score up for a domain, its hard to get back to normal.
 
Thanks guys.

I haven't ever sent traffic to this domain, and as far as I know it hasn't been hacked since I bought it. The site is 100% legit, nothing shady at all, and all unique content.

The adwords account is a year or two old but no activity on it in the last year. A year ago I was running a few zip submits, but stopped and was never banned or anything. Could that be it? I can try out a new domain but not sure how I would get a new account...
 
This is happening because Adwords is a big fucking pain in the ass and there is no rhyme or reason why things are done the way they are. And Google won't tell you either. I haven't advertised with Google in a long time and it's the best decision ever made. Google has gone way too far with their bullshit guidelines.
 
Why don't you try targeting your market through Facebook Ads? Google is a big thorn in the rear. I stopped using Google a longtime now and haven't felt the urge to go back since. Also use twitter ads since they pickup in the serps anyways.
 
If you have a bad history on the account most keywords will start out with low quality score. A bad history means campaigns with for instance low CTRs in the past, among other things.

It may also be that the keywords you are using are in general low quality score keywords from other campaigns by other users.

Eventually, if you have a good CTR on your ads (compared to your competition), the QS should raise after lets say 100+ clicks on a keyword.
 
Just in case anyone has the same problem later...

I figured my account history probably had something to do with it so I signed up for Adwords My Client Center which allows you to have multiple accounts. I made a new account and voila, QS immediately doubled on all my keywords. QS has held steady through the first day of clicks so I'm hoping that fixed the problem.

Now the problem is a higher CPC, but I think its just because the account is new so hopefully that will start to come down soon.