What’s the Deal with Google QS!?!
November 9th, 2007 by 
Amit
Just when I thought I had the Google Quality Score cracked I discovered another layer of complexity!?!
Here’s the deal: I launched a new ppc campaign where I’m sending traffic to a site that my team has quietly been building up for some time now. This site has 100s of articles, PR, age, history, laser targeted landing pages with highly relevant content, the works!
Now I first launched this campaign on a new Google Account that I had started earlier this year. When I launched this campaign I was shocked to discover that most of my keywords were disabled with an OK to Poor quality score?!?
Now here’s the kicker: I paused this campaign, and launched it on my main Google account (one I’ve had since I’ve started), and ALL MY KEYWORDS BECOME ACTIVE. In fact, my quality score was Great and my min bids were all between 0.03-0.05!?!
So what happened? Honestly, at this point I’m not completely sure, but I have some theories:
- Account History : My main Google account has considerable more history than the original Google account I had launched my campaign on.
- Campaign/Keyword History : The new campaign I had launched was actually an upgraded version of a small existing campaign I had been running on my main account. So my site, and some of my keywords had some previous history on my main account. (Btw, I frequently start a small scale campaign for a niche or affiliate offer to test it out, before I go all out.)
Morale of the Story
Your account & campaign history seems to have quit a bit of weight on not just how much you’ll pay per click but ALSO your minimum bids.
Build up one Google account as much as you can, and if you hit the keywords limit and have cut out all the junk keywords from your account, call up Google and ask for an account increase.
You want to use the same account for as long as possible before you start a new one.
Just like a well aged domain name, having a well aged Google account is PRICELESS.
Posted in Google™ AdWords | 
My experience is that what you experienced when using a new account is very short-lived. If you just let it run for a week things should settle down and you shouldn’t really see any difference in the QS in the new account or your old account. If you think about it, it doesn’t make sense for Google to significantly penalize new accounts for a long period of time. I’ve tested this with several accounts and at least for me it’s always very short-lived.
Very interesting. What if the google account has a bunch of previously failed campaigns? Should we still continue building it out or move over to a new account?
I’m going thru this same issue. I created a new account for billing reasons. So how are you going to remedy the issue of the new account?
Your Google Account History is -everything-
You’ll be surprised but -
#1. Your average monthly spend
#2. Your conversion rates (yes)
#3. Payment issues causing your account to go past due (oh yes)
#4. Your account-wide average QoS
and #5. Your account-wide total number of clicks
all have very direct impact on:
Minimum bids, Time-till-live (for new campaigns you launch), Initial QoS (before the human review process) and Ad position.
In an interest of keeping my comment short I’m not going to go into all the ins and outs of this, but I can vouch for every single bullet point above
I don’t know new accounts are great right at first. I’d say the first day or two. But if you aren’t stellar from the start they seem to lose all their steam in about 1-2 days. Then you get shoved to the back. Typically I start a new account throw 10k keywords in it with high bids and track. Then I cherry pick out the good ones and build them up in my main account. But if you let it run very long your bids and prices seem to go to hell.
Well…wouldn’t this make it harder for newcomers to start a campaign on Google? They would have to spend more on CPC which means bigger budget…I guess Google is coming out with a credit rating system for adwords. hehe
Adrian,
Just out of curiosity is this something found from your experience or from some other source?
Would love to hear more about your experience and how you came to this conclusion…
cheers,
Amit
AnotherAmit - We are currently managing $3M a month in PPC (client accounts). It is all our experience, not something I read on a random site.
I will blog about this next week and provide more details and examples.
How active do you need to be on the old account? I have one open since 2004 but haven’t used it since then.
I’d suggest opening a new fresh one. I had an account just like that but little to no activity. And well it was much worse then a brand new account.
Amit,
Can you tell us what the limits are for AdWords? Is it x amount of keywords per campaign with a campaign limit as well?
Great post as usual
Peter
Amit,
This is the case with all new accounts.. I train a lot of newbies that open brand new accounts and they all experience this initially. It’s one of the first things I tell them.. I started doing this a year or two ago because every single one would ask me why they had so many ‘inactives’ in the beginning..
Depending on the volume they are putting up (and assuming the are setting them up properly quality wise), it can take a few days to a week and things will start turning around.
-Matt Levenhagen
P.S. Nice Blog Amit.. You definitely have a super mindset.
Isnt that one person can only have one google adword account? Are you telling me that I can have two google adword account?
Randy - Shhhhhhhhhh…
Make sure you use different IP’s if you’re going to be using separate accounts with separate corporations.
Hi Matt,
Great to hear from you, are you still on AWM? I have you and all the great people that were on AWM to thanks for my success, I learned a lot from all of you.
I was always curious about this history subject. So, does this mean that every time we get slapped by Google it puts a negative, black mark on our score card?
Is having no Google history (new account) like having no credit? You have to prove your self worthy first?
It’s getting so hard to test offers. How are you suppose to find out what works or converts if you keep getting slapped around every step of the way?
Thanks Adrian,
i look forward to your blog post.
-AnotherAmit
I couldn’t agree with you more Amit. I experienced exactly the same thing a few minutes ago. When we moved a campaign from a new account to our old account, the previously slapped campaign becomes active with great quality score and low minimum bid.