Last year, we took on a client in dire need of a campaign overhaul. Their Adwords account needed major mending due to Quality Scores of the lowest kind. It would be an uphill battle but we were intrigued and up for a challenge.
Part 1: Quality Score Killers
Although there are a few different factors that can and will cause low quality score, the main issue with this account was that the keywords were extremely broad causing very high impressions with little to zero clicks. In addition, they were advertising on both the Google Display Network as well as the Search Network within the same campaigns which aided in increasing the number of impressions with very low click through rates. Very low click through rate (CTR) is a quality score killer.
By very broad we mean:
The client provides team building programs within several US cities. They had set up separate campaigns targeting the specific cities, which is a good strategy but they were also bidding on the city names, alone, such as Boston and greater Boston, which caused the account to suffer, greatly. Notice that even the highly relevant terms have a quality score of 2. The irrelevant terms were dragging the whole account down.
From Bad to Worse
By the time the client realized that they shouldn’t be bidding on these irrelevant terms such as city names, it was too late. As they added more markets to their business and then in turn added them to their Adwords account, each new city campaign was pinged immediately with Quality Score 1 across the board even though they had started using more relevant terms with click through rates as high as 20% and 25%, it didn’t matter.
Next, we’ll discuss the main steps we took to revive the account: Keyword Strategy.
