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. If you missed the first three posts, you can start at Part 1: Quality Score Killers.
The Results
Overall the account performance is excellent in comparison to the state it was in when we inherited it. Prior to the overhaul, impression share averaged 11.40%, now it averages at about 70%. We have seen the similar improvements with click through rate (CTR). Before it was under 0.27% and now it is over 3.7%. Cost per conversion is also much better.
Below is a snapshot of the overall account performance in November 2010, prior to our campaign optimization and a typical month after the clean up:
BEFORE:
AFTER:
All of our important metrics indicate that we have been successful in our attempt to overhaul this account but this is a series focused on quality scores, so let’s review:
What were the quality score results?
As we held our breath while going live with our new and improved campaigns, we were very relieved to see that our strategy had in fact improved quality scores. They were not stellar but there were no 1 or 2’s in sight. Generally, we started off with 3 and 4’s but since our CTR was quite good now, things improved quickly.
In Part 1, we showed a snapshot of the quality score from the Boston campaign. Here’s a more recent snapshot:
Some markets have even better results:
A few limitations have been discovered.
Although the account is much healthier than it was last year, we’d like to add some keyword phrases that do not include the city modifier. Even though broad match should activate our ads for phrases such as team building and team building programs, they don’t as much as we’d like. We suspect this could be due to the history of the account. We did add non city keyword phrases about a month after our launch and they were hit with our low Quality Scores of 2. We paused and tried again two months later and they started out with a Quality Score of 3, we are slowly adding more as time goes on as the account performance improves.
What type of low quality score issues have you encountered?
