Something to Ponder If You're Trying Adwords Alone

Oh folks, Google changes so often. It gets more complex, and less transparent as we go along. Both on the Adwords and SEO side.

Right now, I am embroiled a handful of accounts where the people had tried (either alone or with another Google-Person) to do Adwords. And here's the rub - the results from the old campaigns are making trouble for the new campaigns I am creating. The problem stems from something called "Quality Score".

Now, Quality Score used to be rather straightforward, and it was about "relevance". Is *this* website and *this* ad really relevant to this search term? Makes sense, doesn't it! A good thing to weed out people who are mistakenly advertising at the wrong crowd, or whose ad doesn't really match the website's content.

But now it ALSO get's affected by the history of the account. Basically, if you start out crappy, it is an uphill battle to get back in Google's good graces. The end result is *much* higher click costs, and sometimes your ad not being seen for various keywords. It's a pain in the neck.

So, before you think "I'll try this first, THEN call Peter".....well, I'd really prefer you just call me first. Oh yeah, here's Google's official list of items that make up Quality Score....(the whole page can be seen here)

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While we continue to refine our Quality Score formulas for Google and the Search Network, the core components remain more or less the same:

*The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google; note that *CTR on the Google Network only ever impacts Quality Score on the Google Network -- not on Google
*Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
*The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
*The quality of your landing page
*The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
*The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
*Your account's performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
*Other relevance factors