Google Adwords Quality Score Driving me I-N-S-A-N-E

[BrianJGomez]

Here's my issue, I have an Air Conditioning client for whom I've been managing their SEO and Adwords PPC for the past year. The SEO is going good, we are seeing tangible results every month will soon be on page 1 for their most competitive keyword.

On the adwords side, we are having some major issues though and I'm racking my brain. We are somehow getting quality scores in the 2's and 3's on the regular. I've streamlined my campaigns down to the city and within those I've streamlined my keyword groups into the following groups:

City (Campaign)

- AIr Conditioning (keyword group)

- AC Repair (keyword group)

- Fix AC (keyword group)

- Contractor (keyword group)

- Air Conditioner (keyword group)

Every keyword we're bidding on falls nicely into one of these keyword groups and we're putting about 10 key words in each. Landing pages have exact phrase match in page title, h1, bold words, contact form and a coupon image with all the meta tags indicating the image offer matches the offer in our ads. We are running 3-4 ads in each keyword and testing new ads almost daily.

Still getting 2s and 3s on the highest trafficked keywords (air conditioning & ac repair). I've read everything out there, I signed up for wordstream which had some decent recommendations (basically break your ad groups into smaller verticals) which I've implemented to no avail. I'm beginning to think Google is just hustling all these companies in service industry who they know rely on adwords to get phone calls in the summer - especially the HVAC industry. I'm running out of ideas here other than just going to Vegas and putting all my client's on black at the roulette wheel. Seems like a much more fun way to piss away thousands of dollars and at least they'll give me some cocktails.

[EGOL]

My bet is that you have a low CTR.....

If you are bidding puny amounts your rankings will be low and that will make your CTR really low.  If that is the case then open the throttle on the bidding.

Also, have you implemented negative keywords?  Reserving your ad for display for only the most relevant queries will increase your CTR.

Finally, do you have an ad that really pulls in the clicks?  If your ad is a sleeper and everyone around you is getting the clicks and you are not then that will drop your CTR and result in low QS.

[BrianJGomez]

Of course my CTR is low.. however when I hover over my keywords, most of my keywords say "expected clickthrough: average".

I have almost 2000 negative keywords

I've tried everything on the ads. I've copied my competitors, i've gotten really creative and out of the box, the most boring ads work the best unfortunately.

Also, I've got a bunch of long tail kws but none with any substantial traffic.

[DavidKonigsberg]

If you have only 10 keywords for each adgroup it sounds like you need to make more exact/phrase keywords that relate to your ads better -your adgroups are to broad try building more adgroups based on high volume search queries,

[KristinnD]

I saw my quality scores go up significantly when I added 'in' and 'near' to the keyword phrases. Otherwise, the quality score is supposed to go up for keywords with a good CTR over time. People call it the Google Tax.

I just thought I'd add this. Long term I'm using the search term report to add exact match long tail keywords to the adgroups. I bid lower on these terms. The more of these I have, the less overall keyword cost on the account. Do this over time and you can just remove the low QS keywords (when the LT keywords start driving enough traffic) and still and make money. Slow going, but it works.

[EGOL]

Here is what I do.

I make a landing page optimized with keywords that I want to rank for.  Spend time optimizing just like you would for organic rankings.   I don't hesitate to have a couple links out to my homepage and supplemental information pages or even parallel product pages.

Then I open a new campaign and ad group.  Enter some keywords that I want to advertise.  These keyword must tightly match my landing page. I enter some negative keywords that I know will be duds. I compose six to ten different ads that tightly match my landing page and I think will pull clicks for my offer.

I bid high enough to rank #1... settle for #2 if it takes an insane bid for #1.  I hang in there with these high bids to get my CTR healthy.   I watch keywords that bring in traffic and make negatives for any that will bring low quality traffic.  This will improve CTR and conversion rate.   I watch the performance of my different ad copies and drop those that perform poorly... again improving CTR and conversion rate.

I am willing to take a beating on bidding and click costs at the start of a campaign.  I do this to establish a strong negative KW list, drop poor ads and get my CTR and conversion rate up.  This is really important for your quality score.

After you have a nice amount of data you can start making decisions.  Do the math to be sure that you are making money.  You can loose your shirt easily with adwords.

Your goal should be to make maximum amount of profit per day. Not max profit per sale or max number of sales.

If you sell at MSRP you better be bidding for top position and hope that nobody in your niche comparison shops.  If you sell at deep discount max profit per day will probably not occur with you in the #1 position.   Usually a few positions from the top (who you underprice) will be where the sweetspot occurs.  Your results could vary.

Take Brad Geddes adwords seminar and read his book if you are spending serious money on PPC.  This is not a fluffy course.  You will do lots of math and think really hard.  If you go there thinking that you will listen, sip coffee and fart then stay home.   You also better be a guru with excel because anybody who is not doing lots of heavy math is probably loosing his shirt.  Just sayin' that adwords is not easy way to make money for the average person.  You gotta be smart and think hard and have a little bravery with your money.

[KristinnD]

If you do this you may end up with a very low CTR and lots of impressions at the beginning of a campaign. If that happens then you are playing catch-up for a long time. If you are not in a hurry, run just a fraction of your Adgroups to begin with with phrase and modified broad matching keywords, use the search term report each week to see what the negative keywords are, and then expand.Similar negative keywords will come up for each category.

You'll still need to spend into success because you'll have to wait until you have statistically valid samples before making changes and that costs money one way or another.

I like to have average position land somewhere between 2-4 these days.

[flowsimple]

No one has mentioned this, but have you thought about making all your ad groups geo-modified?

My guess is this client is targeting a specific location or several specific locations. Like "air conditioning repair miami" and then also tailor your landing pages to target that location too.