InterneXperts

Recently, we had an issue with chronically low Quality Scores in a client’s account. The Quality Scores were so poor, that even the most relevant keyword/ad copy/landing page combinations were scoring 3/10 and stopped serving after 24 hours. Essentially, the entire account seized up, and we were unable to run any cost-effective campaigns. We tried all the usual remedies, including creating a separate new account, with no success. (It turns out one of the factors in Quality Scores is the historical performance of the Display URL, whose history spans all accounts.)

During this time, we had multiple meetings with the Google Adwords support team. They kept pointing us to the same Google Quality Score Information Page and recommending that we focus on improving the CTR of our search campaigns. We followed their advice over several months, improving the CTR rate of our search campaigns to 1%+. Unfortunately, no improvement in the Quality Scores in our account.

We continued to analyze the campaign data, trying to diagnose the problem. Finally, we noticed something interesting: the historical CTR rates on our search partner traffic was significantly higher than on Google.com search traffic. We had another call with Google about this and asked them whether we should turn off the search partner traffic and focus on optimizing Google.com search traffic only. They said no, because the CTR on search partner traffic does not impact Quality Scores on Google.com. Indeed, the Quality Scores are segmented by network (i.e., Google Search, Google Partner Search, and Google Content Network).

Then is suddenly occurred to us that, it was exactly because the search partner CTR rates don’t affect the Google Search Quality Scores, that was the problem. Google’s assumption is that the CTR rates for search partner sites will be lower than for Google.com Search, hence their emphasis that we should continue to run search partner traffic because it won’t hurt the Quality Scores. But the reverse is also true, great CTR rates on search partner traffic does not help improve the Quality Scores on Google.com. There are a certain percentage of Adwords accounts where the CTR rates are lower for Google.com versus search partner traffic. The Adwords’ interface makes it very difficult to track in real-time how keywords and ad copy are performing on Google Search versus Google Search Partners. If your search campaigns by default for running on both Google and Google search partners, it is important to analyze your performance by network (Click the “Network” tab in the new interface).

Essentially, we turned off search traffic for the Google search partners, and focused on optimizing the Google.com search traffic. In fact, over a period of time, the Quality Scores improved, and we were able to successfully rebuild the account.

If you’ve had similar experiences, we’d like to hear about them, and if we can provide any assistance with your campaigns, please let us know.