Containing and Curing the Low Quality Score Plague: How to Attack the Low Quality Score Source

Warning: The Low Quality Score Plague can have

devastating effects on your paid search campaign

Has your paid search campaign been infected by the Low Quality Score Plague? If so, get on your body suit; here are the top strategies for improving low quality score keywords by finding and attacking the source.

Outbreak Stage 1: The Bite

Symptoms include itchy rash, fever, increased CPC, degrading average position, possible lowering of CTR. Advanced cases may experience lack of keyword serving and inability to achieve clicks for targeted keywords.

To diagnose, include the quality score column within your Adwords reporting or user interface for a recent time period. Low quality score is generally considered to be anything below a 5.

Outbreak Stage 2: Find the Source

Once you have discovered and identified the low quality score keywords in the account, your first question should be "why?", as in, "why are these keywords so poor?" and "why should I care?" After all, you may have done everything right, taken all of the proper precautions including developing a highly relevant landing page and keyword-rich ads.

Unfortunately, sometimes there is no rhyme or reason to a low quality score outbreak. All you can do is grit your teeth and trudge forth with the proper tools and strategies to reverse your fortunes.

Your first step in this situation is to collect all low quality score keywords and understand what their similarities are. Oftentimes, the outbreak will occur within a relatively close vicinity; which ad groups have been impacted most by the outbreak? Find the epicenter and attack from the inside-out. Your ad groups should already be categorized into highly related categories, which should make it easy to find the problem-category. If this isn't the case, you may want to consider restructuring your campaign to reflect closely knit themes, or doing some good old excel detective work to find the common theme with infected keywords.

Outbreak Stage 3: Identify the Potential Causes

We've already established that sometimes outbreaks can occur despite your best preparations. However, if you have noticed a recent and/or dramatic drop in keyword quality scores, there is likely a primary cause or a notable event that led to the issue at hand. Things to consider when looking for a cause:

• Dropping CTR - This is the number one cause of low quality score outbreaks. A low click through rate will drive down quality scores pretty quickly, so if your CTR has seen a dip recently, you may have found your source.
• Recent PPC change history - Have you recently made revisions to ads, CPCs, keyword content, destination URLs, or other account materials?
• Website Revisions - This one is pretty straightforward, but double-check to make sure no recent landing page changes have taken place.
• Google policy changes - This is tougher to pin down, but Google is constantly making changes to their indexing algorithms, which may impact the relevancy score for your website. Sometimes, it's the only explanation (...darn black box!)

Taking this first step may make it easier to isolate the elements that need testing or optimization.

Outbreak Stage 4: Attack the Source

So far, you've been able to identify and quarantine the infected keywords, and you may have even found potential sources for the outbreak. Now, it's time to get on the path to recovery.

• The number one way to cure a low quality score outbreak is to improve your CTR for infected keywords. This should be the first offensive tactic employed, as it will have the most immediate and drastic impact on low quality scores. Since you've identified the epicenter of the outbreak, start there by employing new ad creative, calls to action, and other tactics that will result in a higher CTR. If you haven't already, pause or optimize the lowest CTR ads.
• A great way to improve low quality scores for infected keywords is to split them out into separate ad groups and try new ad tactics from there, instead of tinkering with and potentially harming the high quality keywords in existing ad groups. Move the LQS keywords to new ad groups (i.e. Ad Group 1 - LQS) and experiment away!
• If the source of the LQS outbreak was concentrated in one ad group or category of keywords, you should consider the keywords themselves and their relevancy or effectiveness. Why are these particular keywords most infected? Examine search query reports for highly irrelevant user searches that could lead to low CTR; look for new negative keyword opportunities; consider easily mistaken keywords (i.e. windows [home] or Windows [operating system]?); consider more defined match types, especially for broad match keywords; or think about pausing these keywords altogether, as long as they aren't key conversion drivers.
• According to an unnamed Google representative, quality scores are highly affected by account history (not campaign, not ad group, but account) which means an account with bad CTR history may be doomed from the start. In extreme cases, you may want to consider creating a new account, and starting strong by rolling out high CTR keywords first with aggressive bids to build strong overall account quality before expanding keywords to lower CTR categories. If you don't currently do this, I highly recommend targeting and bidding on brand keywords, if only for the residual high CTR and quality you'll receive.
• Activate Google Ad Extensions. This one is sort of a "what came first?" scenario, since you require high quality scores to show ad extensions in the first place. However, as long as you are bidding on brand keywords, this should not be a problem, at least for a portion of your targets. Implementing Ad Extensions will drive a higher CTR overall, which will lead to better account quality and higher quality scores overall.
• Look at bounce rate and on-site engagement statistics. Google won't openly admit it, but bound rate and other engagement statistics surely have an impact on quality score. Although the "keyword relevancy" of a landing page is vastly overstated, one cannot emphasize the importance of landing page "trust signals" enough. Instead of stuffing more keywords onto your landing pages, please consider conversion and content optimization, and make sure your landing page always pays off the promise.

Containing the low quality score outbreak is about more than just cost per click bids and landing page relevancy. The most important factor in curing this plague is by ensuring that you are targeting the right keywords with the right ads and the right landing pages. Only then will you be completely immune to low quality scores. The tactics above will help show you the way.

...but just to be safe, I'm putting on my clean suit.

Why is this guy juggling in a clean suit?

The world may never know.