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Ask PPC Hero! How Does a Weak Campaign Affect the Rest of Your AdWords Account?Posted by Joe on November 25, 2008 in Ask PPC Hero, Google AdWords Quality Score |
We are doing some catch up with our reader submitted questions so today we are posting another “Ask PPC Hero” article! Recently, we received a question from Shweta, and here is what they asked:
“If I keep bad performing campaigns and good performing campaigns in a single account, will they affect each other in any ways?”
Good question! In a nutshell; yes, a poor performing campaign can negatively affect your account history, therefore damaging your account level Quality Score.
How does this happen? There are numerous levels to the Quality Score within each account: keyword, ad text, ad group, content, campaign, account. A weak campaign can have a negative effect on your account history which can hinder other campaigns within a given account.
We have asked our Google AdWords Representatives for specifics on this topic and they responded vaguely by saying that account history does not directly affect your Quality Score. However, they have also said that having a positive account history is extremely important to your AdWords success. What does this mean? It means that they didn’t want to explicitly state how your account history and account level Quality Scores are determined. And in turn, this means that this is an element of your account that can’t be ignored.
Shweta, another aspect of this question is why keep a poor performing campaign around? If your ROI is negative; your click-through is low; and your cost-per-conversion is inflated, what are you getting out of this campaign?
Sounds like this poor performing campaign could be hindering your Quality Score and your bottom line. Here are your next steps to head in the right direction:
- Determine why this campaign is performing so poorly. Remember to use all of the AdWords report tools at your disposal.
- Decide whether this campaign is salvageable or if it should be paused outright. What is holding this campaign back? Really drill down to the ad group and keyword level.
- If you decide that this campaign is crucial for the success of your account, then you need to create a plan to streamline/optimize this campaign.
I hope this helps!
Do you have a pay-per-click related question? Ask PPC Hero! You can drop us a line by clicking here!
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November 25th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Account history used to be absolutely crucial when migrating campaigns.
It was fundamental to migrate accounts between different agencies – preserving all the years of click history etc
However, now, not so much. As quality score is assigned at the time of search, the history of an account has less influence in quality score now. You can build quality score very quickly to a 9 or 10.
However, I agree, if a campaign is poor – delete the whole thing and start again, removing the bad performing ad groups, ads, keywords etc
Good post (as usual) guys
November 26th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Does this apply to paused campaigns, or just active ones?
November 27th, 2008 at 1:00 am
Yes, I join to Dave’s quetion.
December 2nd, 2008 at 8:13 am
Hey everyone:
@ OnlineMedia: You are correct, you can re-build your individual keyword quality scores quickly due to the scoring mechanisms. So, moving keywords doesn’t effect your campaign as much as it used. But a performing campaign can bring down your account quality score.
A paused campaign is still part of your account quality score chemistry but it shouldn’t carry as much weight as an active campaign. However, if you have a campaign that had a poor performance, and you don’t plan to utilize those keywords or ad texts again, why not remove it? It’s an idea.