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- Sphinn It!
Went Hot: June 10, 2008 - 8:23 pm
Posted By: Kimota 391 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://searchengineland.com)
Category: Google AdWords
"If you've inherited a "dog" account, it could be a long, long time (like maybe forever) before minimum bids on a poor account get down to sustainable levels. It's as if Google starts out assuming you're an idiot, but then you have to go and prove it by ringing up piles of untargeted clicks. Now they know you suck.
So if you inherit this puppy, the long struggle to right the ship may wear you down, and the client's budget may be exhausted if you aren't first."
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"It isn't 2002 anymore. You can't just open an AdWords account, go in there, and play around. Sorry." I couldn't have put it better myself.
Great article. Fascinating reading for me (a guy who doesn't do PPC).
When inheriting a poorly managed adwords account, as Andrew pointed out sometimes starting afresh can save you time and money while the account is in Quality Score Hell. Here are a couple of other things you can do:
KEYWORDS WITH A POOR QUALITY SCORE ARE LIKE A CANCER
Another thing you'll want to do immediately is hunt down all keywords with a "poor" quality score. These are like a cancer in the account. Put them on pause until you can build up the score and then reintroduce them a few at a time to test at first.
CHECK YOUR CAMPAIGN SETTINGS - LET GOOGLE OPTIMIZE (For now)
You'll want to make sure that the Ad Serving setting is set to: Optimize: Show better-performing ads more often. This goes counter to what we normally recommend since you'll want to have this setting to: Rotate: Show ads more evenly to allow for proper ad text split testing however the immediate goal is to boost the CTR once you've cleaned up the account (pause generic keywords, resctructure adgroups, rewrite text ads if needed, send traffic to appropriate pages, revise bids, etc.).
The above two tactics have been instrumental in turning around accounts in Quality Score Hell that we inherited. For an overview of a few additional things you can do to turn around poorly managed campaign check out a post I put out a few weeks ago: http://sphinn.com/story/47781
We've also inherited lousy accounts and been hurt by them, more so lately than before. Our Google rep told us to start a brand new account for one client, rather than trying to fix their old account. We did so, and Google immediately recognized it as being related to the old one (due to the destination URLs being the same), so it penalized us anyway. Setting up a new campaign didn't help us at all.
We're also frustrated by many of our most targeted tail terms getting low quality scores, I think because impressions are low. We've found, as Xurxo says, that pausing them helps the entire campaign. But that means we have to rely more heavily on our broader, less targeted terms. These are also more expensive. So this may fill Google's pockets faster, but it results in lower quality traffic for us and a worse user experience for searchers using tail terms who see more general ads than they have to. Where's the logic in that?
Before you make the final decision to jump to a new account, it is also important to understand the impact the Display URL of you ads have on Quality Score. While, Google doesn't document this anywhere, the Display URL has a huge impact on your position. And before any jumps down my throat that I am wrong, I assure you I am right, have tested it, and had an engineer at Google confirm it.
I had a client who allowed their affiliates to run roughshod on Google without any rules. This client was in the online education space. No matter what they did, they couldn't get past page 8 of results on Google, but on Yahoo and MSN they achieved top 3 position with a $4 bid. We tried revamping the existing and starting a new account, no luck. I then did a test of increasing bid all the way to $99, and once we did that, earned position 5 on page 1. We clicked on it and then dropped bid back down and waited for the charge...$96. Google's answer was no solution without significant spending and that affiliates caused this. I then tested a few more things, refusing to quit, and changed the display URL for the online school to www.TimDaly.edu. Guess what? Position #3, Page 1 with a $4 bid.
Long story short, switching to new account is not answer by itself. Before switching, gauge other factors such as display URL.