Comments on: 5 Things to Consider When Inheriting a Google AdWords Account

By: Michael Wiegand

Michael Wiegand — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 00:56:24 +0000

All my accounts are inherited, luckily from other SEMs who knew what they were doing. But still, I found these 5 tips really helpful.

By: John

John — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 21:36:14 +0000

August,

My biggest piece of advice to you is to exercise patience. It sounds like you’ve done all of the right things by creating well grouped, highly relevant ad groups. Whether or not you are fighting against a bad account history, this should eventually get your account up and running. In the case of the extremely high “inactive for search” bids, it may make sense to increase to these levels. We have experimented with this and found that with time, the minimum bids eventually begin to decrease. In a discussion with our AdWords rep, they informed us that in some cases opening a brand new account with the same keywords, same ads, same organization can generate the exact same results. In other words, even with a clean slate of Quality Score/history, those keywords could still trigger “inactive for search” status.

Sorry I don’t have a definitive answer for you, but hope that I’ve helped. I would also suggest that you discuss this with your AdWords rep. They may have some helpful suggestions for you!

By: The Adventures of PPC Hero - Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management : Our Greatest Hits for November!

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 21:33:59 +0000

[...] A problem many professional SEMs run into is inheriting PPC accounts from clients who most likely didn’t know what they were doing. This creates a unique set of problems for account management. With Google AdWords, those problems are compounded with Quality Score. This post outlines five considerations for appropriately managing an inherited AdWords account. [...]

By: August Ash, Inc.

August Ash, Inc. — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 15:53:55 +0000

I recently inherited an AdWords account to manage. I paused the old ad groups and have completely revamped the account. You mentioned using an old account to benefit from the Quality Score history, but can this have a strong negative impact, as well? All words in all my ad groups are inactive for search with minimum bids from $5.00 to $10.00.

My ad groups have few terms that are closely matched with each other and to the ads and landing pages. While the score for all terms may not be great, it shouldn’t be poor. I even tried adding the company’s own name as an experiment, and it still showed a poor quality score/inactive for search.

The account had been poorly managed in the past with one large ad group, terms irrelevant to the landing pages and ads, etc., but it had been paused for a good amount of time before I made changes and activated the account. Any ideas if account history might be the reason for the poor quality score?