How To Recover From a $10.00 AdWords Quality Score

April 18, 2008

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Did your campaigns or some of your campaigns got hit by the Quality score? There have been many buzz lately on webmasters forums and found an extremely good thread in Webmaster world which I will post here some interesting replies and for sure will try to answer some of them and giving my own tips from my experience.

We own one PR6 web site that used to spend $1,200/day on Google Adwords for over 2 years. (Yep, a little over $1.1 million!)
Then last month - wham - went from .15/click to $10.00 per click across the board. Needless to say, we had to quit giving Google our money. This might have been the cause for their stock decline.
We have some sites that have been hit, others not. It’s fairly random. We know how to make decent landing pages, try lots of ads, and add a lot of negative keywords, etc.

OK - NOW THE QUESTION:

Has anyone around here successfully reversed a $10.00 bid to reasonable levels by making changes to their site / keywords / ads?

You have to check if your adwords account have been hitted or your domain name have been hitted, how you can know this? just create a landing page similar to the landing page that you have and add some content (I prefer to make it unique) like 20 to 30 articles, then change the display URL and the Destination URL for the new domain name, wait a few days or a week and see if the quality score changes. If yes, then your domain name have been slapped and your account is fine, if your account have been penalized then try the following:

• Delete all your campaigs that have poor in CTR and Quality Score
• Create a campaign with a keyword that have HIGH traffic and Low pay per click, just to build up your CTR. Search in Google adwords keyword tool a high traffic keyword related to your niche and don’t have competition (no problem if it not convert). This method is usually the hardest but let’s continue
• Do not combine Search + Content Network. If you have campaigns with Search + Content Network. Disable the content network and create a new campaign for it. Always make different campaigns for content network because usually the CTR is Low
• If you don’t have many campaigns, just delete all your campaigns and don’t run ads for one month, then start a new campaign.

In case your Domain Name is the cause of your Quality score here are some recommendations:

• If you have an “Old way” of landing pages, few pages with some content then read this Google Adwords Slap: The Solution?
• Make sure that your sites are loading fast enough read this article: Landing Page Load Time Affects Quality Score
• Check for the main factors of a landing page to have a “great” quality score. Read my Adwords E-Book for free.

Here are some replies and recommendations by other users:

If you are in the business of:
eBook sites
Get rich quick’ sites
Comparison shopping sites
Travel aggregators
Data collection (free offer (ad) - register now landing page).

The chances are, you can’t recover it or find it extremely difficult.
What to do: i think the only way here is to get another domain and try to mask or put in .gif your text. (not the best thing in a world for sure)

If you have pages that are:
Affiliate (bridges): landing page with an affiliate link(s),
you might be able to recover it. I’ve seen these type of site(s) recover from the slap. (not by going to another domain, but actually recover)

My conclusion: you may recover, but highly unlikely.
just FYI make sure you have a privacy policy.

I believe that the minimum bid level is somehow reflective of the account quality score - so I don’t think you can recover the campaigns/keywords until you somehow rehabilitate (no pun intended rehabguy) the entire account.

I’m not sure how you’d do that; what I would probably do is take out everything that has a poor quality score, and slowly build it up again, but that would take too long for most businesses, I would think. On the other hand, if you’re priced out of the game anyway, you can’t do *worse* by following that path - the only thing you’d be risking at that point is time spent.

What if the answer is no? In my experience, Google is a forgiving company. I noticed that you’re not asking how to clean up a site, only if a reverse of bids is possible. Well the answer to that is anything is possible but you need to figure out why you have this penalty in the first place.

With an account as large as this one, why not just give Google a call?

Here is a user explaining how he recover from this slap

Here is how I recovered from a $10.00 Quality Score!

We run a campaign that has a similar daily spend and has over 1200 keywords. We have been “slapped” with a minimum bid of $5-10 CPC on hundreds of our over the past few months.

After doing a bit of research on the issue I was not able to find concrete evidence that the issue was not a “glitch” in the Adwords system.

This is what I did to resolve the issue.

In Adwords Editor, I copied all the keywords that had the higher minimum bids into a 2nd version of the same exact campaign that only had adgroups with the slapped words in it. I then deleted the words from the original campaign, posted the changes, waited a half hour, then posted the new campaigns with the slapped keywords.

Viola! No more high minimum CPC’s. This has works for a period of time until SOME of those words get slapped again. I do the same, and create a version3 campaign.

I have not had to do this for a while now as it seems as though our keywords have not been slapped again.

FYI, in the secondary and third duplicate campaigns that only have the slapped words in them, I use the same exact campaign, adgroup, adtext, landing pages, etc.

My conclusion, is that it can be glitch in the system as well as it can also be “true” poor quality scores that are triggering this to happen. In our case, without knowing the full QS algorithm, we did not deserve the higher min cpc. So I just was persistent to getting the words showing up. But if you are have experience with Adwords and their guidelines, you should be able to see whether your landing pages and kw’s are relevant enough for the ads.

One last thing. I do see more long tail “slapped” words then 2-3 keyword and key phrases, in my alternate campaigns.

Adwords can be extremely frustrating to “optimize” for. In the beginning it was just about getting click thru’s, and then converting. Now it’s a battle just to get your ads to show. There are times when it all makes absolutely no sense. They put up the $10/click “suggestion” but you know for certain bids in the .50 range are what people pay at the top. This is especially maddening for long tail terms, which demand no more than .15 for a solid position.

I always find it a little amusing when they suggest the $10.00 click for thousands of key words. Not, $4.80, or $7.50, or $9.48; its always $5.00 or $10.00; Not a lot of effort or credibility their that they even really understand what the problem is.

We have had this happen to us, but mostly when we create brand new campaigns. A few months back we created all new accounts for organizational purposes and campaigns that had 10,000 key words all performing beautifully went straight to the $10 barrier; most recovered and are doing well, some did not. All were good ad’s, that landed on well created landing pages, which were on good sites; nothing complicated there.

Personally I don’t think the “Quality Score Algorithm” is close to ready for prime time; hopefully their working to improve it. It doesn’t make much sense to me when quality advertisers want to pay for clicks, and their essentially saying we don’t want you.

As far as a solution, try a little optimization just like you would organically. Title, meta description, ect. The do read the ads, seems to have helped a little. That and raise the bids and just try and slowly get back in their good graces.

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