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How Does Moving a Keyword Effect Your Quality Score in Google AdWords?Posted by Joe on July 14, 2009 in Google AdWords Quality Score |
I was recently reading the Quality Score Fact of the Week over at the AdWords Agency blog. This week’s Quality Score tip inspired me to do more research and expand upon the topic that was discussed. First, here is the Fact of the Week:
Restructuring your account does not cause you to lose your historical Quality Score information. The historical performance of your keywords, ads, and landing pages is preserved when you restructure your account. Therefore, we encourage you to restructure or optimize your client’s account structure as needed.
Let me first say that I agree with this statement. The historical Quality Score for a particular keyword does transfer when the term is moved into a new ad group.
However, keep in mind that when you move a keyword you can temporarily reset its Quality Score, therefore negatively effecting your ad position and overall performance.
Why does this temporary set back occur? AdWords needs to re-acclimate to this keyword’s new location and possibly new ad text. This means that when you do a major account re-structure, you will see a fluctuation in your performance. If you have optimized your account for the better, then your performance will begin to pick up after the restructure – but it will take a little time.
Another reason a temporary set back can occur is due to the relationship between your keyword and ad text. As your keyword builds its click-through rate, it is invariably tied to a specific ad text within your ad group. In a way, they share the Quality Score. When you move a keyword but neglect to bring the ad text with it into the new ad group, you have effectively severed that relationship.
If your keyword has performed well historically, then it will gain back its Quality Score, ad position, and performance relatively faster than a keyword that was performing poorly in another ad group, or a completely new keyword. So, what was said in the Fact of the Week is true, you won’t lose your historical Quality Score and that historical Quality Score will help you re-gain your keyword’s traction.
And this brings me to another topic on restructuring: moving a keyword that is doing poorly will not automatically help improve its performance. If you have a keyword that is relevant and has more potential if it’s in a different ad group, then move it. But if you are moving a bunch of keywords to try and reset their historical performance, that won’t work. And this is why historical performance does follow a keyword even if its moved. A bad keyword in any group is going to have a low Google AdWords Quality Score.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t restructure your account. In fact, we highly encourage you to optimize your account structure in order to enhance your account’s performance.
This is why I want to expand on this Quality Score tip. It isn’t wrong. It just doesn’t give the full picture. Restructuring your campaigns is a great to make your ad groups more focused and write better targeted ad texts. But there will be some bumps along the way.
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July 14th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
I used to suggest everybody not to touch the ad groups and campaigns if its performing average, the reason i have experienced in many campaigns after re-structuring the campaigns, the results i mean conversions are reduced in many of my campaigns.
With your information, planing to start my ignition again for re-structuring the campaigns. Lets see..!
July 15th, 2009 at 5:54 am
@Niyaz: You shouldn’t settle for mediocre performance. But as I said in the article, you’ll see some fluctuations in your performance but overall, a re-structure will be beneficial. Best of luck!
July 16th, 2009 at 11:52 am
Restructuring your account is something you should do if you have low quality scores and/or performance is marginal. One thing to note, if you want to do a massive overhaul you’re better off restructuring gradually rather than all at once. That way the loss in temporary quality score history will not be as dramatic for you.
July 19th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
Nice post, Joe. While you should try not to move keywords if things are running well, sometimes you have to.
For example if you have a large adgroup and some keywords have lower q-scores, pulling them into new tight individual adgroups with a very targeted ad to the term can pimp the q-score without even touching the landing page.
Or if you inherit an account that was never set up correctly from the beginning, you may have to move keywords around to improve long-term performance. 1 step back, 2 steps forward.
August 21st, 2009 at 12:51 pm
If you move a KW to a new ad group, you should bid it 20% higher for about 10,000 impressions, and then slowly reduce the bid.
September 21st, 2009 at 8:40 am
Hey Joe,
Typically when I ‘peel and stick’ keywords into their own ad groups, they do indeed lose some quality score + min. bid goes up. Just did it now for one and the Q.S. went down from 10 to 7 while the min. bid went up from 0.25 to 0.40. I agree that typically this should self-correct but I haven’t personally monitored the exact (or average) time it takes though. I do have trouble understanding why the Adwords System doesn’t automatically transfer the historical Q.S. since you usually copy/paste the best performing ad into the new ad group so it has that data already. The temporary “glitch” therefore seems hard to explain from a practical point of view.
My conclusion would be to be as granular as possible from the start so that most keywords don’t have to be moved at all. Performance can be boosted in the existing ad group by split testing against new ads and/or new landing pages. That way, you preserve your original Q.S. 100% of the time (unless of course one of the newly tested ads does particularly badly in terms of ctr and does so for a long time).
September 21st, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Hey Joe,
Just noticed that the keyword I had moved, once again has a Q.S. of 10. So the Q.S. was very temporary. What did happen though is that somehow the min. First Page Bid is now 0.35 instead of 0.25 in the old ad group. So while the Q.S reverted, the min. First Page Bid did not. This may be a coincidence obviously and due to other factors (like maybe a new competitor who just started bidding on that keyword in the last couple of hours).
Regards
Olivier
October 11th, 2009 at 9:16 am
[...] How Does Moving a Keyword Effect Your Quality Score in Google AdWords? | The Adventures of PPC Hero The historical Quality Score for a particular keyword does transfer when the term is moved into a new ad group. However, keep in mind that when you move a keyword you can temporarily reset its Quality Score, therefore negatively effecting your ad position and overall performance. (tags: adwords ppc keywords qualityscore google) [...]