The new account was just that, completely new with no history and the strategy I used within the new site was something that I would have done within my own account – which must have an overall quality rating of excellent.  I realised that this lack of account history combined with my fairly advanced adwords strategy (I used around 150 keywords spread across 18 AdGroups) may have been too much for the new account.

The result was that after the first two days of running this campaign and running up a minor cost of around £25, all my keywords had been reduced to a quality score of 3/10 and were now at the status where google says ‘minimum bid not high enough for first page’ or something similar.  I was puzzled at first and immediately increased all CPCs to match the google advice.  I left the campaign going for another day and noticed even less impressions and clicks than the two days before…something was wrong and I started to re-assess the situation.  Here’s how you can increase your Quality Score from 3/10 to 7/10 in 3 steps.

1. Build Good Quality, Keyword Rich Landing Pages

The first thing I tried was to re-create my landing pages.  I adjusted the title, checked the heading tags, checked the in-page text content, made sure I wasn’t redirecting or hiding any links and added a couple of extra paragraphs of content and a couple of images.  After a day’s worth of adjusting the page, I was happy that my landing page, whilst not perfect, was good enough to avoid such a low quality score.

2. Check Ad Text, Keywords and AdGroups

I went back into the AdWords account and double checked all ad text, keywords and ad groups to ensure they were well matching and tight.  They were.

3. Turn off all AdGroups except one

I then started to think that I was just basically too new for Google to like me.  So I tried to immitate a smaller, less knowledgable AdWords user in order to build up some account history.  I turned off 17 of my 18 AdGroups so that I was left with only 1.  I increased the minimum CPC to the amount that google said I should (£1.50) per click (this had become artificially inflated due to me starting off the account in a poor way and had increased my minimum CPC due to my poor quality score). Now I had to increase my CPC just to get back on the first page of results because I was now confident that if I could get my ads showing, people would click on them.

I did just that and now that everything was in tune, my CTRs for that 4th day increased from less than 1% to between 4-6%.

The following day my quality score increased to 4/10.

I left the campaign running for another day exactly as it was and again, CTRs remained stable at between 4-6%.

The following day my quality score increased to 5/10.

The next day I reduced my minimum CPC (I could see that average CPC paid was about £1.25) to £1.40 and continued to pull in a 5% avge CTR.

I continued this process for about 14 days, each day reducing my CPC a little in line with avge CPC paid the previous day.  My CTRs have remained constant since then and I’m now paying less than £1 avge CPC and my quality score on this adgroup has increased to 6/10, with one day fluctuating into 7/10.  I am estimating that as I repeat this process across the second of my 18 adgroups, my overall account quality score will increase and as a result, my overall CPCs reduce.

So to put it all in a nutshell: if you are starting a new AdWords account or don’t have a very good historical AdWords Quality Score performance record then start small with one very tight adgroup and refine/hone it until it starts to obtain a better quality score.  When you are happ at around 7/10 or 8/10, open up your next adgroup and build outwards form there.

Happy bidding….