AdWords Answers: Quality Score, Paused Keywords and Below Page One Bids
Written by: on April 29, 2010
I regularly talk with many PPCers and clients who want to better understand their AdWords campaigns, don’t understand some nuances within AdWords or just need to know how to get their campaigns to “the next level”. Some of the same questions come up over and over again so here are the top 5 questions I hear regularly with answers that have been verified by AdWords representatives.
1. How can the average position of a keyword be on page one but AdWords is telling me the bid is below page one?
This will only happen on broad and phrase match terms. It means that the bid for that specific keyword is below page one but when the keyword is broad or phrase matched to other search phrases, it can appear in higher positions because the bids and competition for those phrases are not as much as they are for the specific term that you have bid on.
This presents a good opportunity to look at your search query report and see what phrases your keyword is being served for and add those phrases so you can control the bids for each keyword phrase.
2. How do paused keywords affect campaigns?
In the past we were told if we no longer wanted a keyword to run but it had good CTR or other attributes that would benefit a campaign we should pause it. If it had bad attributes, we should delete it. This is no longer the case as pause keywords do not have any effect on campaigns anymore. Once a keyword is paused, it’s CTR and quality score no longer impact the campaign overall. The keyword has already helped or hurt the campaign before you paused it. Therefore, if you are never going to want to reactivate a keyword, you can delete it. The only benefit to keeping keywords paused instead of deleting them is that you can reactivate them and keep their performance history at a later date.
3. Does having a lot of paused keywords in a campaign affect the campaign?
No, as mentioned above, paused keywords do not affect campaigns. However, if you have a lot of paused keywords you may want to delete them to reduce bloat as very large campaigns take longer to download/upload with AdWords Editor. Also having a lot of clutter in your campaigns may distract you from problems you need to address.
4. Does having a lot of low search volume words harm campaigns?
The short answer is no. When a keyword gets no impressions, it has no effect on the campaign. However, if the keyword is served a few times and gets no clicks, AdWords may decrease the Quality Score which will affect the campaign. You need to closely monitor low search volume (well, really all) keywords for Quality Score and either try to get the Quality Score up through optimization or delete any from your campaign that are not generating revenue/leads/etc.
5. Are all Quality Scores weighted the same?
All Quality Scores are weighted equally and do not affect a campaign more or less based on the number of impressions they receive. A keyword with a 7 Quality Score and 10,000 impressions will affect the campaign just as much as one with a 10 quality score and 100 impressions. So, you should concentrate on doing everything you can to maximize the Quality Score for all keywords. Of course increasing the Quality Score of the highest traffic ones will result in the most benefit as reducing the CPC on the highest traffic terms will result in the most savings. But, you shouldn’t ignore the rest.
Also, keep in mind that AdWords assigns Quality Score based on keyword, regardless of match type. So if you have the same keyword on broad, phrase and exact match, you will have the same quality score for all three so you won’t have to worry about increasing the Quality Score for all three individually.
If there are any other nuances or things that make you scratch your head when dealing with AdWords, post them in the comments and I’ll give you my take.
These are great tips, Pam. Thanks for the advice.
Still I have a question for you. According to this blog (redacted), it says
“There are several factors used by Google to determine how a keyword performs, and also the potential performance of the keyword. This is the main reason how a keyword that has no impressions at all can affect an account.”
I know it’s impossible to predict what Google is thinking/how they might determine potential performances of a keyword…but I’m curious to hear your thoughts.
Thanks!
My answer is that that paragraph doesn’t actually say anything. Yes, there are many factors that play into a keyword’s performance but that doesn’t tell you anything about how low impression keywords are treated. These answers came directly from my Google rep so they’re (slightly) more trustworthy than someone’s guess.
Hey Pam,
Interesting FAQ post. I’ve another question for which I haven’t got a proper answer yet and haven’t much brainstormed on it and infact while searching for its answer i landed on this page. So My Question is:
“Does changing or (better ask ‘decreasing’) the bid will affect QS of particular keyword?”
My Scenario – ” I want to reduce avg bid for whole ad group by significant amount, as it was kept way too high by someone.” Should I do this? Current QS of the keywords are between 5-10.
Waiting for the answer…
The act of reducing your bids will not, in itself, reduce the QS. However, if you reduce the bids enough that your positions drop so much that CTR is negatively effected, QS could be reduced as CTR is such a large factor in the QS calculation. However, if you have negative ROAS you’ll need to decrease the bids no matter what so you aren’t losing money. So, ensure you have high-performing ad copy and slowly reduce bids until you find a level at which you make a profit. If QS drops, combat it by writing more compelling ad copy & refining your negatives to increase CTR.
Thanks so much for the answer, Pamela! It is going to be quite helpful to me!
Ok so putting up another questions for you..
“Are Bid management tools useful? should we use them for smaller campaigns? are there good free tools available for this purpose? Which one is the best” (for Adwords)
I hope I’m not bombarding you with questions .. (
lol, though I know I’m !)
Bid management tools are useful if you have thousands of keywords that gain benefit from regular bid changes. However, for most accounts, manual bid changes are more cost effective. I don’t use bid management tools so I won’t recommend any.
This was the exact answer that I was looking for. Thanks Pam!
I’m going to bookmark the site and revisit it after I get myself a fresh cup of coffee. So much to learn. Keep on keeping on!
Pausing keywords/ad groups/campaigns has been a topic of discussion for sometime between some friends and I.
Thanks for clearing up the affect pausing has on QS, because I hated the idea of losing all of my historical data just to test a QS-improving tactic.
Excellent post. Something I encounter often that makes me kind of crazy…wondering if you have an opinion on this…
Particularly when a campaign is new, after a day or so, it is common for Google to show you a bunch of “bid is not high enough for first page” messages.”
Google will show you an estimated bid for first page.
When you increase the bid to match, or be slightly bigger than, the first page bid, the message will come right back, only now it’s even higher!
It always bugs me. It’s like Google saying, “This guy is willing to increase his bids by this much, bet he’ll increase it even more!”
Any ideas on this?
Thanks for all the great material – I’m new to your site and I’m enjoying it…
Hi Harry – I never trust Google when it comes to telling me what my bids should be. Bid what makes sense for the keyword. If you are getting good CPAs and can afford to test a higher bid to see if you get more clicks and conversions, run and experiment and see what happens.
That being said, I’m sure Google isn’t playing games and trying to get us to inch our bids up. What I imagine is happening is that there are so many factors that are taken into consideration every time the auction is run (every time a search is done) that they haven’t perfected recommendations for bids.
Best of luck!