A lot of times when we get new clients, they already have an existing PPC account they’re managing, but for obvious reasons needed the help of a PPC firm.  The first thing I normally like to do when getting these clients is a complete re-organization of the account to immediately begin improving the structure for Quality Score and Quality Index purposes.  However I have learned that taking that approach can actually hurt your overall quality score, which obviously isn’t how you want a new account to start off.

In this post I’ll give you a few tips on what many advertisers do when inheriting a new account that can sabotage their quality score without them ever realizing it.

1.       Moving too many keywords/ad groups too fast:  When I inherit a new account too many times I see 10 to 20 ad groups piled into one campaign.  What I like to do when I see this is open up Adwords Editor, and begin copying and pasting keywords into new ad groups, creating new campaigns for these ad groups and writing new ads all in the same day. However this can be detrimental to your account Quality Score. The reasoning behind this according to my Google rep is that any positive performance could be lost when you make a lot of changes at once, and she definitely recommends making changes more slowly. In addition, she says that you should rotate in new ad texts instead of deleting old ads and adding in new ones. That way you can let the new ads build up positive history for a few weeks before deleting the old ads, and you’re less likely to experience a drop in Quality Score.

2.       Making large bid changes:  The next thing I would typically do is find keywords that have many conversions with a low CPL and begin increasing their keyword bids if possible.  Please note that making small bid increases at one time is okay. What I’m talking about it making a lot of large bid increases or decreases to one account at the same time. This too can be harmful to your Quality Score for the same reason mentioned above.

In the end, when inheriting a new account that is already set up, take it one day at a time. Plan accordingly what you want/need to do day by day.