Have you ever truly thought about what your overall account Quality Score looks like and how it has affected your PPC account over the years?
The more I manage long term clients the more I realize everything I do today will greatly effect what happens to my account Quality Score in the future.
Achieving a great Quality Score does not happen overnight. It may take a week, a month or longer. But by constantly optimizing your PPC account over time you will see the effects of having a great Quality Score. Those effects are mainly seen in the cost it takes to get your PPC ads in higher positions. Over time, your costs should be less, and your ads should have higher placements.
I mainly work with my ad groups and ad texts to achieve a great Quality Score. And lately my new Google rep mentioned something to me that I don’t think I realized before.
She mentioned that paused or deleted ads/keywords do still have an effect on your account Quality Scores. Now I could have sworn my Google reps before told me that paused and deleted ads or keywords do not have a negative or positive effect on your quality scores because they’re no longer active. After all, you’re supposed to pause or delete poor performing ads/keywords; so why would a paused or deleted ad/keyword still negatively affect your Quality Score?
To add to this, even Adwords Pro Sarah on 11/5/09 mentions that although pausing or deleting have the same effect, that if you pause or delete a group of great performing keywords, your Quality Score would be based on the ok and poor performing keywords in that ad group, and no longer the great performing keywords you paused.
You’re right- there is no difference between deleting and pausing in terms of Quality Score. The only real way you could see an affect is in a scenario like this: you have 100 keywords, 50 performing well, 25 performing ok and 25 performing poorly. If you paused all 50 high performing keywords, your account quality score when then be calculated from the ok and poor performing keyword- so you would see a drop in the overall account Quality Score. That said, if you reverse the scenario and only pause the poor keywords, you could see a positive affect.
(AdwordsPro Sarah).
If anyone was under the impression that paused or deleted keywords or ads didn’t have an effect on your overall account Quality Score, please throw that out the window.
The following is a statement from my Adwords rep stating when to pause and/or delete ads/keywords in order to achieve a higher account Quality Score:
The historical performance of paused or deleted ads and keywords will continue to affect your account history. However, we still recommend deleting poorly performing ads and keywords to improve Quality Score. This will prevent the ads and keywords from performing poorly in the future and further affecting your account history. As the rest of your account accrues more performance history over time, the impact that the deleted ads and keywords have on your Quality Score will diminish.
I think it’s a good idea to delete poor Quality Score keywords and ads so they don’t accidently get resumed for some reason. Just note that in Adwords you can still resume deleted ads/keywords – so be careful of that.
If you’re really trying to increase your click-through rates (as you should be) delete those old poor performing ads, and continue writing new ads to test to increase your click-through rates. That should help over power old deleted ads or keywords that have lower Quality Scores.
