Does adding a new ad variation effect QS on adwords?

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noisecode

noisecode

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So I setup a campaign yesterday afternoon.. Had an OK QS score for my main keyword with 30 cent minimum..

Later on it jumped to 1.00 minimum and said my QS was poor about 4-6 hours later..

Then this morning, right after 12:00am EST when the new day began, almost every one of my keywords, including my main keyword went to Great and had my minimum bid set to 1 cent on everything..

I thought this was great, so I dropped my minimum bid to 1 cent.

Right when I did this, I noticed traffic began to slow down.

I was still getting a few hits, but it dropped to like 1/10th of what it was a few minutes earlier.

I had 2 ad variations running which were similar and dropped the lower CTR ad and made a new variation of the higher CTR ad.

I go back to my keywords and almost all my keywords got set to "Good" again instead of great, and back to 10-50 cent minimum bids...

So.. wtf is up with that shit? I didn't change any content on the page. The only actions I took regarding the campaign I mentioned above.
 


Also, competition, from what I can tell, stayed consistent through the entire process.

When I lowered my max CPC it disabled a few keywords, a few of which were getting a lot of impressions. Could this have made any difference?
 
Now everything's poor and up to $1 per click. I don't see any new competition when searching for the keywords. My content never changed and the only ad variation I have now is my original ad with the higher CTR.

Fuck Google. Fuck them up their stupid billion dollar asses.
 
You went to a one penny bid and your traffic went down? Amazing.

Really what did you expect?

You need to make small changes to any campaign to track. Sounds like you went from 30 cents to one cent because you thought you could pay one thirtieth the cost. Just ignore those "tools" and suggestions Google gives you. Estimated traffic and QS and all that crap. Information overload... Just read about how to write good ads and ads for QS. Then bid to be in the the 3rd to 6th spot. Going cheap you probably wont be in those spots. Run stuff for a while and then make one small tweak at a time. Pause the ads that dont work well once you are sure they dont. That will help CTR and QS.
 
Yeah, but the one penny bid was for a highly searched term. I figured if Google deemed my site "great" and allowed me to bid 1 cent, why not? Should I just pay 30 times more and shit on my ROI? My minimum bids went down, and my CPC went down, but there were still a few terms bid with a higher CPC than my ROI on the clicks would recoup. Was it only because of how fast I dropped my minimum bid and why the fuck should that even matter to them if they've already evaluated my site as 'great'.

I don't see why lowering my minimum bid should effect my QS considering my ad position only dropped 1-2 spots.

Should I have expected a 1-2 spot drop to lower my traffic 1/10th? On a keyword with high search volume and low competition? On an ad with high CTR? 1-2 spot drop out of about 3 ads being displayed total. I understand that not being #1 means a lot, however the traffic drop was really the least of my worries. If I was still getting that 1/10th everything would be peachy.

I know it's not exactly common knowledge, but I was just looking to see if maybe someone else did what I did and got the same results, thus making that action a factor.
 
Just because it sets your minimum bid at a penny doesn't mean to lower your bid that much. At that point, you should keep your bid the same for a bit, and you'll see Google lowering your bid, but keeping your same position. A drop of a few spots can greatly decrease the CTR - #3 on a blue banner to #5 on the side can be pretty drastic, or even 1 or 2 on the side to 4 on the side.
 
Yeah, I fucked it up good. I KNEW I shouldn't have touched it, but I can never leave well enough alone. I try to maximize my ROI and shoot myself in the foot.

Now that I don't really give a shit, here's the keywords.

ellenadwords2.jpg
 
how the fuck did you get .01 bids

i ran the ellen thing for a few hours and i got .20 and .30 bids
ended up just running yahoo which was fine with .10
 
Ya, first day was .20 and .30, like I said. No idea how I get the .01, was hoping someone would give me some insight.
 
If God liked me, my QS for those keywords would still be 'great'.

I've got some new ideas ready for a new campaign. Thanks for the suggestions.
 
you should post the creative that was 'good' and the 'creative' that was 'bad'.

to boil it down...yes, a new ad can affect QS very much so
 
Ok I will tell you why that is happening. Firstly never go down to the lowest bid as that will just bring your clicks and impressions down. Always have few cents above the min. Also the google robots constantly keep on going on your landing page and thats why it keeps on changing. don't ask me why it changes i think its do do with the bots programming. Next it can take up 2 2 weeks before you get a constant QS (from personal experience).

Also a big problem i see is the fact that you are collecting emails which certainly changes the QS depending on the bot which scans your page. From what i know there is a separate bot for looking at the text and different for the input etc. ( I know coz I have seen up to 5 bots come on my landing pages just after i put up my google campaign.)

Hope this answers the question.

btw a smart move by having the email field as you are hitting two birds with one stone. Firstly you are collecting a email for later use and secondly you gettiing a lead from it.
 
Onedollaridea said:
Ok I will tell you why that is happening. Firstly never go down to the lowest bid as that will just bring your clicks and impressions down. Always have few cents above the min.
Click to expand...

A lower bid will bring your clicks and impressions down (duh) but it won't affect QS in the slightest.

This case seems pretty cut and dry - campaign's landing page, keywords, and ad are relevelant. user uploads ad that isn't relevant (or as relevant as the orginial ad). QS goes up.

I'd like to see the landing page and ads too, but I could understand why you wouldn't want to show them.
 
Landing was ellendegeneres.us.to and the ad isnt very important because the only change I made between one ad and the other was adding an 'a' in front of $500 gift card, so went from 'Receive $500' to 'Receive a $500' so I doubt that would effect CTR enough to crash the QS, especially over the short period of time that this happened.

I can understand an ad that provides a lower CTR crapping on your QS, but is this something that's calculated when the ad is submitted, after some ad performance numbers are in, or both? Seems to be both to me.

My newest theory is that Google is recrawling the landing page and seeing if the page is become 'more relevant', such as pages with user generated content like comments.

I think thats why age matters a lot. Google likes to keep tabs on the history of the site to throw that in their QS/relevancy algo.

At the same time, they don't seem to necessarily punish you for pages that are 'new to them', seems they just take the page at face value and continue to evaluate its content over time. If it stays stale, QS dives.
 
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