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

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).

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.

With your information, planing to start my ignition again for re-structuring the campaigns. Lets see..!