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!
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