I have low quality score in Google Adwords, why?

HI Fredmila
I have recently been in the same situation as you with ad words and I had a huge burn rate

I dont know your SEO levels but here are some basics.

• run your campaign for 1 month dont mess play or alter anything.
• run 2 ads per product aka split copy testing.
• make sure the ad targets the specific page the product resides on.
• run your advert schedule only for your customers online hours eg 7:30 - 12:00
• prior to logging onto anything get a piece of paper and write down your associated keywords take said keywords and then convert them into sentences eg. car > new cars > I would like a new car. long tail keywords they are much easier to compete with the big boys.
• crank up google keyword tool from the columns option enable cost per click.
• input your keywords each one on a new line and hit search, once you have the results back sort by local monthly searches, everyone normally try's to compete for the top 10 keywords but look at the CPC and if it out of your budget move on, take what high keywords you have left assign them to your campaign and leave them alone for 1 month, this gives you a clean set of stats to work from.
• make sure your onsite copy is optomised for your keywords as google ignores the meta completely apart from the page title.

My conversion rate is less then 30p and my first page bid is less then 10p
if you have any further question please do not hesitate to ask.

Thank you very much I am also available for Birthdays, weddings and bat mitzvahs

Thanks Stavros,

Some of the things you say are in Chinese to me but I will go to the Adwords help pages to learn about them.

Dont they are normally out of date and not relevant just google your question and you are more likely to get an answer from a source just like this.

Just a couple of other points to add to the mix
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1. 1 -make sure all keywords are relevant your website. For example I have a good quality score for "web marketing" as it has a good keyword density on my landing page. However, the keyword "internet marketing" (which means the same thing) and in another adgroup with related adtext has a lower quality score. This is becuase I don't use the word internet marketing on my landing.

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[*]2 - You mention campaigns but not adgroups. Are all your keywords in one adgroup? My adgroups have very few keywords in but the keywords are very tight to the subject keyword or phrase. For example I do not have "web marketing" and "internet marketing" in the same adgroup even though they are very closely related. It is far better to have many adgroups with highly targeted keywords and adtext.
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[*]3 - Are you deep linking to the relevant page your keywords are related to? What I mean by this is, if you have separate pages on your website talking about a specific category, product or service, make sure your destination URL is going to that page and not your homepage.
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The regional aspect makes no difference to the quality score only the traffic volume and if you don't bid on the bigger keywords you will get no traffic at all. It's one of the perils of regional targeting I am afraid.
No your advert will not show on the first page of listings if you do not bid the minimum bid shown by Google

hope that helps

Some great stuff from Stavros and MagnifyB

Ref the adgroups, thats something I didn't appreciate until recently, and it makes a huge difference!


I must admit, I have found for some keywords, I deliberately bid well under the minimum amount (otherwise our spend would impact our conversion rate), but do get some targeted traffic and cheap conversions.

The advert will appear sporadically, but for a fraction of the amount of quoted minimum. Wether its other advertises setting schedules which don't correspond to yours, and the minimum amount bounces during the day, I don't know, but this has worked well for the last couple of years.

Also, don't think anyone has mentioned negative keywords.

This is a critical way of refining your traffic. Remember adwords isn't meant to be a traffic generator. Your paying for it, so the only traffic you want is targetted, and likey to convert.

The google explanation of Negative keywords is a bit woolly, so hopefully my example will help.

If we take the keyword business directory, we found that we would show up in searches for phone directories, electorial roles, and people looking for BT. This traffic is never going to lead a goal conversion, so its better not to get it, and stop people clicking on our adverts.

So we would add a negative keyword campaign of:
[telephone directories]
[bt telephone directories]
[electoral list]

You can make your negative keyword campaign as big as you want, and keep monitoring your ads, and track where traffic is coming from, and keep tweaking until the only people clicking your advert, are properly targetted. As long as people like what they see when they get to your site, your conversion rate should soar.

Adwords is a powerful marketing tool, so keep playing and tweaking with it and let us know how you get on!

I was just about to post on negative keywords and you beat me to it.
I have to also agree with Steve I have some real juicy expensive keywords that I cant compete on so I bid 50% of the google recommened bid and I get some good results.

I think the results are probably from the display network as it is not as fiercely fought over as the front page serps. I have tried to figure out how to track the display network stats on there own but I cant find a answer.
what I may do next month is run my under bid keywords in a seperate campaign and run them only on the display network and see what the results are.

Here is another one that caught me out.
Always create your ads in an adgroup called drafts, then when you are happy with the text, copy them into your live group and activate them.

there are 2 reason why I do this.
1: if you are not happy with the performance of the ad pause it, go back to your drafts amend the text and copy back into your live group and activate it, That way you can do a side by side analysis of there performance stats.
2:This one really messed up my stats last month if you make a change to a live advert it zeroes the performance stats and you lose everything. I could have kicked myself

Yes Steve you are right and when I am using Adwords nationally I would have some that are under the minimum amount. However, i find that when regional targeting under a 50 mile radius, if you don't get on the first page for every single search query for that particular keyword/phrase there isn't enough traffic. For example my keyword of [internet marketing] ( on exact match) shows a average local search volume of 27100 (for exact match) but in July the actual volume of search with my regional targeting to date is 346......1.27% of the local United Kingdom searches. As I targeting 35 miles around Sheffield so hit the borders of Manchester and Leeds.

And yes negative keywords are a must if you are using broad match (good explanation too )

Also just want to add when you set up your campaigns have separate campaigns for your search and display ( don't have both in the same campaign). This allows for better management of your keywords

Thanks for the tip magnifyB I have been trying to figure out a good way of tracking the display network results.
simple and effective.