At the quality score session at SMX Advanced London yesterday, a question was asked about what to do with low quality score keywords. It was framed as a query of when you should turn off keywords because they were below a certain quality score level.
I helped answer the question, and then tweeted some quick advice on the subject. It got a few RT’s and the interest and some more thinking drove me to elaborate in this post.
While the virtues of high quality score, and the techniques to try to achieve it have been covered here often, the truth is that for many reasons most accounts sometimes have keywords with low quality scores – which we’ll define as those of 5 or lower.
Broadly speaking you should work to improve those scores, and often if you can’t the best answer is to pause or delete those keywords. But that isn’t always wise or feasible.
B2B Keywords With High CPCs
Patricia Hursh of SmartSearchMarketing.com made the great point in her presentation that for B2B Marketers with very expensive keywords, often it’s much better to write copy that *discourages* unqualified clicks, which results in low CTR and thereby poor quality score – but much better ROI.
Ideally you’d query-mine those keywords as completely as possible – to find related words on which you can earn good QS – but that won’t fully solve the problem and so her advice is wise.
Quality Score Collateral Damage
The other case is keywords that are important to your business or goals and have low qualty score that you just haven’t yet been able to increase. When making the decision to leave these running, consider their impact on your overall account-level CTR.
If these keywords have huge impression counts and really bad CTR (the cause of bad QS if you don’t have landing page penalties) then the cost of leaving them running isn’t just the over-bidding you’re likely to have to do on those keywords. Those bad keywords will actually help lower the quality score (albiet only slightly) on all the good keywords in your account.
But if those keywords have only a relatively low impression count as a percentage of your total account, the ‘collateral damage’ of leaving them running will be very slight. So go ahead and run them guilt-free if you really want to.
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Hi Craig,
I certainly agree with your points here. I've seen keywords in my accounts with poor quality scores that net me a fair amount of conversions, even more than some keywords with higher quality scores. Bottom line is that I am going to keep keywords with poor quality scores running if they are proving to be profitable.
-Matthew
Hey Craig,
Good summary of the issues involved in deciding whether to turn off a low QS keyword or leave it running. Obviously, normal optimization should result in non-performing keywords being removed anyway. The decision to pause a performing low QS keyword is always tough. I typically let them roll and focus on bringing the CTR% up when possible.
Good post.
Brian
Hi Craig.
Good points!
I do hate to see low QS keywords and am often given the task of cleaning up accounts with low QS keywords. I will pause when I can, mine what I can, but sometimes it is so frustrating to get to those keywords that are important for the account and still low QS. Of course I attack the CTR and do the best I can and often I see immediate improvement (lower CPC) for keywords that do not yet reflect a QS improvement but show CTR improvement….guess I am saying I try not to get too hung up on the actual QS (#/10) when trying to improve a keyword quality score but watch the CTR and CPC's instead. I usually see the CTR increase reflect immediately in a CPC decrease and have to wait weeks to months to see the actual QS score increase – especially for keywords with lower traffic.
Wishing I was there to hear your talks…..
Kim
The B2B comment makes sense and it would be fine to take the pre-qualifying route and ignore QS, except… I see plenty of cases where Google stops showing your ad because your quality score is too low. Then what do you do?
Great point. I don't think the'll stop showing because of low QS unless it is really low – below 4 or worse. I'm not sure that scores that low are good to run anyway as they usually (but not always) indicate some real penalty or problem. But the question points out that a real complete answer has to figure this out all the way down the different levels. May take some research but thanks for raising and I'll try to get back to that part of the topic.
Interesting and smart way to think about it. I wonder if the delta between your seeing results and visible QS changing is the fact that they use different numbers behind the scenes. Clearly QS updates much more frequently than PageRank, but there is less talk about the (true) fact that the QS they show us isn't the QS that they use in their calculations. So when you move the CTR up, they QS might go from 43 to 47 behind the scenes but still report at an unchanged 5 on screen? As you say, could be a delay issue in the reporting. Who knows, but clearly results are more important that scores, and in a deeper analysis and coverage the 'what's acceptable' even for B2B should be based on some ROI numbers.
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