Let’s get this straight. I’m an AdWords certified professional. I use it day in and day out but every now and again, despite doing everything right, Google AdWords resfuses to play nicely.
Frustrated by a low AdWords quality score of 5/10 and a low predicted click through rate for a recent new AdGroup I’d put live, I contacted Google AdWords to ask them what I was doing wrong.
To give you some insight, the campaign was using a maximum cpc bidding method, and there was no issue with the keyword bid, as we were appearing at number 1 in search.
AdGroup Outline
- The campaign itself was built around the keyword “Strong rooms”.
- The keyword we were targeting was “strong rooms”
- The advert headline contained the keyword “Strong rooms”
- The ad copy contained the keyword “Strong rooms”
- The ad link contained the keyword “strong rooms”
- The landing page was called “Strong rooms”
- The landing page META title included the keyword “strong rooms”
- The page title on the page was “Strong rooms” and the page mentioned “strong rooms” several times in the body copy.
How could I possibly make my advert and landing page more relevant to the keyword “strong rooms” I wanted to know?
Google told me;
“Although your keyword relevancy is high and meets what the algorithm looks for, your performance is poor compared to competitors.”
Er, right. So I pointed out we only had 1 other competitor with active ads for that keyword, and that the campaign had been running for less than 24 hours and had barely generated any impressions yet, yet had still managed to drop from the default 6/10 to 5/10. Due to the AdGroup being new, I pointed out that obviously the CTR would be low until we started increasing page impressions. I asked what they were basing our quality score on given it was a relatively new and there wasn’t much campaign data to go on.
I was told;
“We can’t share the exact data this is based on but it is aggregated based on industry, keyword match type, geographic location and various other factors that come into play.”
I asked what they suggested I do to improve the 5/10 quality score.
I was told;
“You have done the foundations well. I would recommend giving it some time for the ctr to build up.”
So there you have it. For a keyword that isn’t receiving heaps of searches yet, we were automatically given a poor QS based on little to no active campaign data, even though relevancy wise, there was no way we could have made the ad more relevant. Frustrating huh?
The post The Endless Frustration of Google AdWords – High Relevancy but Poor Quality Score appeared first on Marketing & Social Media Blog | Marketing insights, tips and advice.
