What’s the Deal with Google QS!?!…Part II
November 13th, 2007 by 
Amit
Okay, wow!
I’ve been doing some more testing and I’ve decided I’m moving ALL of my campaigns to my main account.
Here’s what I found, a campaign that we launched about a month ago on my second Google account (the culprit) was getting killed in terms of QS, even though my team had build a substantial site, following all of Google’s landing page QS guidelines.
What’s worst is that we had to pay around 0.50 a click just to get decent ad placement on search. Which was NUTS, considering on my main Google account I was promoting a different product but in the same general niche, and my CPC was considerably less.
After I discovered (my last post) my account history on my main Google account was giving me an excellent quality score, I moved a part of my above campaign over to my main account just to see what would happen.
I not only noticed that my min bids went from 0.15-0.30 down to 0.05-0.10, I also noticed that my ad positions were WAY higher for the same Max CPC.
I know, I wrote a whole post about how your ad position is only effected by CTRx(bid price)x(ad history). Actually a famous Adwords guru (who’s name I will not mention) told me this.
Now I have to admit, I was wrong dead wrong about this point. YES, your quality score DOES effect your ad position AND your min bids.
How much does your quality score (in this case account quality score), effect your ad position and average CPC?
Just to give you an idea one of the adgroups that I was paying 0.68/click for position 4 on my second account, I paid 0.59/click for on my first account for position 1.
Overall, on my main Google account my CPC for this campaign, on search, went from 0.47/click to 0.30/click!?!
Now I know this may sound very discouraging to a lot of newbies out there. The fact is the more account history you have : the better your QS, the lower your min bids, and the lower you pay per click.
Can you just image the ridiculously unfair advantage I have over a newbie trying to compete with me in the above market.
0.47/click vs 0.30/click?
I should say I make this market profitable paying 0.47/click, but at 0.30/click I can DOMINATE.
If you are a newbie keep this in mind:
This game gets easier and easier the longer you play it. Play Adwords game over an extended period of time and build up your history on ONE Google account.
The longer you play the game the better you get at it and the easier Google makes it for you.
So stay persistent!
Posted in Google™ AdWords, Super Affiliate Mindset | 
That’s quite a positive spin to put on the issue. You could also say: “Give Google lots of money to begin with, so you eventually can give them a little less.”
But you’re right. The rules really do seem to have changed over the past few months; I’ve seen sky-high CPC on my personal account (which is comparatively new) compared with the accounts I manage for my day-job (most of which are a couple of years old).
Tuppy
Haved paused all my Adwords campaigns for months in favor of Adcenter and Yahoo, and then recently starting them back up, I would venture to say it’s beneficial to simply login to all your Adwords accounts on a regular basis. I did this and unpaused campaigns without any noticeable changes in minimum bid or QS. Of course there are many other factors and I can’t be 100% positive, but it seems simply logging in regularly keeps the account in some sort of an “active” state.
Amit, why would anybody start a second account, especially when your main account has a long history, good CPC etc?
Richard
Now you got it
“Amit, why would anybody start a second account, especially when your main account has a long history, good CPC etc?
Richard
”
Because Adwords has a limit of 25 campaigns and limit on number of keywords (forgot how many)
Account history is not as important as you think.
You want low bids:
-have the keyword you’re bidding on in the URL, page title, at least one header tag, an alt tag, in the body copy and the footer (optional).
-use a domain that is more than 6 months old (this can have a BIG impact)
-have a privacy page, contact page (even if it’s just an email link), about us page (optional)
-have at least one link out of the page to an authority site in your niche
-to avoid having to manually setup a page for each keyword use a script to replace the words via tokens in the title, h3, alt tags and body.
Set it up once and you can easily apply it to any page.
Amit - Great post as always.
We included more information about this topic here: http://www.softwareprojects.com/resources/the-basics/t-your-google-credit-rating-1438.html
I have an account from back in 2003, but I was probably inexperienced so I’m not sure if it has great history…… I’ll be sure to try my new campaign on that account, and on a fresh account, and send you my findings?
“This game gets easier and easier the longer you play it. Play Adwords game over an extended period of time and build up your history on ONE Google account.
The longer you play the game the better you get at it and the easier Google makes it for you. ”
LOL. Don’t H8 the playa, H8 the game!
This comes straight from my account manager, who is on the national agency team:
“tons of keywords with poor performance within an account
can begin to affect the quality scores of otherwise alright keywords within the same account”
This means to me that flooding your account with garbage keywords = bad idea..
Butf you have a good account = Better Quality Score = Lower Minimum Bids, Higher Positions, etc..
It’s true. I’ve known about this account history thing for quite awhile. I even know of some guys who are in the same situation as Amit says, but they automatically get a great quality score too, no matter what they bid on. I know it’s kind of conspiracy theorist and tin foil hat stuff, but it’s proven. The older your account and the more money you’ve spent with Adwords, the easier it will be to conquer a niche.
Good post.
One big key is if you are new focus on low competition markets with high margin. I have a simple rule - if everyone is talking about it online (ringtones, credit offers, zip submits, etc) I need to leave them alone and find more open waters. Come back to the other markets down the road.
http://www.softwareprojects.com/resources/the-basics/t-your-google-credit-rating-1438.html
this is a great post by Software Projects on this topic
I have an Google Adwords account for the past 2 years. But I started some campaign with different account which I thought was cool. But I realized recently for one of my free trial signup campaign which I had a separate account and I was paying more than a dollar per click, after getting frustrated I switched that campaign to my main account then the Cost per click came down to .30cents. Great! And Thanks for sharing this tip.
Newbie question. Does it have to do with the amount of time the account has been open or how many ads have been served through it? I have an AdWords account from a year or so ago that I used briefly and has sat idle since then. Does that offer much benefit?
Amit, this time I can’t agree with you about it. I have read few months back about it and tested with 10 different niches and all the same niches with the new adwords quality scores. Is wierd why you are getting those results.
Everything is the same? Even the amount of money that you want to spend per day?
Googlelady… are you suggesting that the higher your daily budget is, the better your quality scores will be?
Peter
Peter
If she is, than I agree with her.
REC… unreal.. well, makes total sense. Very much like a bank the patrons with the most favorable history get the lowest rates.
I actually find this encouraging knowing if I can keep my campaigns performing well, over time Big G will make my life a bit easier.
Peter
The largest paying customers and the longest paying customers are treated well. As well they should be.
It would seem that this is the case. That and Ad relevance.
How revelant is your keywords to your ad. They may be the best keywords ever in your mind. But if Google though that your ad did not bring anything of value to the searcher, than maybe on behave of the seacher, google is not showing those ads. Maybe, just thinking out loaud here. Even with a big budget some keywords do not bring up any ads. If anyone checked out the “google developer day” vids on you tube, they were discussing this fact. (can’t remeber the name of the vid) …mmm sorry for the bird walking off topic there…
Sorry I think that was “Google Analyst Day 2007″
I’m very surprised to read this Amit,
I hate to sound braggy, but we have a team of 7 dedicated account managers at Google and spend over 20k a day. And when our site got hit by the quality score a number of weeks ago, they actually advised us to start up a new account. The site hasn’t gone live yet, in the new account.
They’ve done all the transfering for us and I just took a look and the bids have gone down from the previous account.
Here’s what I know:
Your landing page gets a score of either: Bad, Okay or Great. And after that it depends all on how you structure the campaigns and the CTR’s you’re getting on certain positions. For example, a 4% CTR is good, right ? But not in a 1st slot position. And yes, make sure your keyword comes back in the Ad Text. This helps
So if your main account has a great performance, stick with it. If not, move to a new account