5. Increasing Your Advertising

Ok, so now you have an AdGroup that’s active and running but that’s all you have. So what do you do next?

Simple, now we are going to create more AdGroups to cover more keywords and get more traffic. This will bring you more visitors and more sales, resulting in more profits!

Getting More AdGroups

First off, to create more AdGroups you will need to actually create a new AdGroup. To do this, go to the campaign you’re advertising in and click on the link titled “Create new AdGroup”. This will take you down a familiar path where you should now easily be able to successfully create a new AdGroup.

Getting More Keywords

One of the things you will still need help with at this point is generating a larger keywords list and grouping your keywords. This way you can get more traffic to your advertisements. I will explain how to create additional keyword lists and how to easily group your keywords in the sections below.

Getting Started

Since you already have your campaign and AdGroup setup, we are going to use a much faster and easier approach to generate larger keywords lists and relevant keyword groups. To do this we are first going to create the keyword list and then we are going to group the keywords.

To generate the keyword lists, we are going to use a combination of “Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool” and “WordTracker’s Free Keyword Tool”.

Google’s Keyword Tool / WordTracker’s Keyword Tool

There are two ways you can access Google’s Keyword Tool. The first way is by clicking or using the link below:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The second way is to login to your Google Account. Once inside your Google account click on the “Tools” link near the top of the page, then click on the “Keyword Tool” link. This keyword tool is excellent to use. Its one of the best keyword tools I have seen, and it is free. I would highly recommend this tool for everyone advertising with Google AdWords.

Step 1) Start off in Google’s Keyword Suggestion tool by entering the address of the website you’re promoting in the “Website Content” section of your AdWords keyword tool and search for related keywords.

Step 2) Google will now display a list of keywords that are relevant to the website you’ve entered.

Step 3) Once you’ve added all of the relevant keywords to the list, click on the “Descriptive Words or Phrases” option on the keyword tool.

Now, look at the first keyword in your keyword list on the right side of the page. Type this keyword into the text area in the “Descriptive words or phrases” section and click the “Get Keyword Ideas” button. Google will then search for additional keywords related to the keyword you’ve entered.

When the new keyword results appear, do as you did previously and add all of the relevant keywords to the same keyword list on the right side of the page by clicking on the blue “Add” link.

Step 4) When you’ve added all of the relevant keywords to your keyword list, look at the second keyword in the list and search for additional keyword related to this keyword. Remember not to search for two different keywords at the same time in the keyword research tool. Although Google allows doing this, it doesn’t give you as many keyword results.

Keep on searching and adding relevant keywords to your keyword list until you can’t find anymore keywords.

Note: After you search 20-40 different times using the keyword tool, Google will give you an error saying that an error has occurred and their engineers have been notified. This error means that Google has noticed you over-using the keyword tool and they aren’t going to allow you to use it for the next 10-15 minutes. Don’t worry, this happens to me all the time. If this happens, just download your keyword list to your computer (instructions this are found in the Keywords section of this site, step 4) and finish your keyword list in 20 minutes or so.

If this happens or if you run out of keywords to search for, it’s time for you to shift over to use WordTracker’s Keyword Tool. To use WordTracker’s keyword tool go to http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ and on the main page, enter a keyword that describes the product you’re advertising. When the results appear write down all of the keywords that you feel are relevant and you haven’t already searched for on Google’s keyword tool. After you write down all of the keywords you feel are relevant, search for another keyword on WordTracker and do the same.

Step 5) After you’ve added keywords from WordTracker for 10-15 minutes, try Google’s keyword tool again. This time copy and paste the first keyword from the list you generated with WordTracker into Google’s Keyword Tool and find similar keywords. Once again continue adding all the keywords you’ve found to be relevant. Keep doing this until you’ve found all the keywords possible for the website you’re advertising.

Only Getting Traffic Generating Keywords

You don’t have to do this step, but it’s something I do every time. We need to make sure that you only add keywords that will generate traffic first. Why? Because your account is new, Google won’t have an advertising history for you. If you don’t have an advertising history, Google won’t know what to ask you to bid for keywords that receive very little traffic and these keywords may get low quality scores. But, by starting off with only advertising traffic generating keywords at first, and then adding the keywords that receive very little traffic, you will ensure that you will be getting the lowest cost per click and the best positions for those keywords possible.

Step 1) Go to Google’s traffic estimator tool by going to the following website address: https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

Step 2) Copy and paste all the keywords from your keyword list (if you have more than 1,000 Just copy and paste 1,000 at a time). Then select your available countries as “All Countries and Territories” and don’t enter a max daily budget. When you’ve done this click on the continue button.

Step 3) Google will now display all of the keywords that will generate traffic. Google will also display the keywords that will receive zero traffic. So to filter out the traffic generating keywords from the non-traffic generating keywords you will need to download/export the results to a file. In that file just copy and paste the keywords that generate traffic and save it in the same file as the keyword list you created with Google’s Keyword Tool, except name it something like “Keywords with Traffic”. Don’t expect all of the keywords in your keyword list to be traffic generating keywords. Usually 30% or less are.

After you’ve done this continue to the next step to group your traffic generating keywords. After you are successfully advertising the traffic generating keywords for a week or so, I would then add the non-traffic generating keywords to your account. This will help increase your traffic in the content network and possibly the search network.

Grouping Your Keywords

Now comes another important part. You will now need to sort your keyword list into smaller keyword lists by theme. This means if you were selling laptop computers you would put all of the “Dell” keywords into their own keyword list, all of the “Apple” keywords into their own keyword list, etc.

Don’t worry though because there is no way I would have you sort all of these keywords into smaller AdGroups yourself. That would take forever! Instead, you will use a free tool that Google offers called “AdWords Editor”.

Here’s what to do step by step:

Step 1) Download AdWords Editor (it’s free) by going to the following website: http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/. You can also find the download link within your AdWords account.

After you’ve downloaded AdWords Editor, install it on your computer.

Step 2) Open AdWords Editor and it will ask you to enter your account information for your AdWords account. After you enter your information, AdWords Editor will download your entire account so you can view it through the AdWords Editor software.

Step 3) Using the drop down menus at the top of AdWords Editor go to “Data > AdGroups > Add New AdGroup.

This will cause AdWords Editor to create a new AdGroup. Don’t worry, nothing you do in AdWords Editor effects your Google Account until you post the changes.

Name this new AdGroup DELETE because you will eventually delete this AdGroup (you will see why shortly).

Step 4) Now go to the DELETE AdGroup you just created (it should still be selected since you just named it) and click on the “Keywords” tab, because we are going to add your keyword list.

Once you’re at the “Keywords” tab click on the “Make Multiple Changes” button and select “Add/Update Multiple Keywords”.

A window will open up and in this window you will see a large blank area where you can insert the keywords. Now, open the file that contains the keyword list you created on Google and copy and paste all of the keywords from that file into the window that’s open in AdWords Editor. When you’ve done this, click on the “Next” button for AdWords Editor to review the keywords. After AdWords Editor has reviewed the keywords click on the “Finish” button to add the keywords to your account.

Step 5) When the keywords are added to your AdGroup, Go to the “Tools” menu and select “Keyword Grouper”, this will open the Keyword Grouper tool.

Before you click on the “Generate common terms” button to start grouping your keywords you will want to tell AdWords Editor to ignore certain common words. To do this enter the following words into the “Ignore these words” section of the keyword grouper:

After you’ve told AdWords editor to ignore these words, click on the “Generate common terms” button. This will display the AdGroup names that Google will group the keywords into. Then click on the “Next” button for AdWords Editor to sort the keywords into those AdGroups (note: AdWords Editor will create the AdGroups for you, you don’t have to create them).

Step 6) Now AdWords Editor will display the title of the AdGroups as well as the keywords within those AdGroups. Make sure that you don’t copy your text advertisements to each new AdGroup by checking “No, don’t create any text ads in the new ad groups”. When you’ve finished reviewing the changes, click on the “Finish” button for AdWords Editor to sort and group all the keywords within that AdGroup.

Removing Duplicate Keywords

Now that you have all the keywords you’ve added into AdWords Editor, you need to remove any duplicate keywords you may have. This is very easy to do, and all you have to do is to select the campaign you want to search for duplicate keywords by clicking it on the left side of AdWords Editor. Then simply go to the “Tools” menu and select “Find Duplicate Keywords”.

A window will pop-up and in this window select “Strict word order”, “In the same campaign” and “duplicates must have the same match type”. Then click on the “Find Duplicate Keywords” button.

Google will now display a list of the keywords within your account. If you look through the list you will see keywords highlighted in purple. These keywords are duplicate keywords and you should delete these from your account. You can delete them by selecting the keyword with your mouse and then click on the delete button.

Getting Keywords to Your AdWords Account

Since you’re more familiar with your AdWords account than AdWords Editor, it will be much easier to just copy the work that AdWords editor has done into your account. If you’re experienced with AdWords Editor or if you feel you can update your account with AdWords Editor feel free to do it that way.

Step 1) Decide which keyword group you’re going to make into an AdGroup first by looking through all of the keyword groups AdWords Editor has created. Remember to choose relevant keywords.

Step 2) In your Google account (not AdWords Editor) open the AdGroup you’re wanting to add keywords to or create the AdGroup you’re going to use.

Step 2) Create a text ad for the AdGroup, make sure it’s similar to the keywords you’re going to put in this AdGroup.

Step 3) Copy the keywords from AdWords Editor into your AdGroup. You can do this by selecting the keyword group in AdWords Editor, clicking on the keywords tab, and exporting the keywords to your computer by clicking “File -> Export to CSV -> Export Current View”. Then open the file AdWords Editor created and copy and paste the keywords into your account.

Step 4) Wrap the keywords you’ve selected to add into your new AdGroup.

Step 5) Finish and save your new AdGroup.

After you’ve finished and saved your new AdGroup you should add more text ads to the AdGroup you created. When you’ve finished adding text ads, you should add another AdGroup to your account. Keep doing this until you have several AdGroups in your account. I realize that this can take a while, so if you need a break, you can continue reading and pick up on adding more AdGroups to your account when you’re done with your break.

Campaign Management

If you ever need to go back and change some of the settings you’ve applied to your campaign, please read below.

Editing Your Campaign

You can always add or remove the countries you’re advertising in. If you ever do want to edit the countries you advertise in or any other campaign information, just do the following:

1. Go to the campaign you want to adjust the settings for.
2. Click on the “Settings” tab to go to the Campaign Settings page.
3. The edit campaign settings page will look something like this. Here you can re-name your campaign, change your daily budget, decide where you want your ads to be displayed, choose which language you want, and pick which countries/cities/etc. you want your ads to be displayed in.

Campaign Settings:

You will want the following settings to be applied to your account, so in the “Campaign Settings” page of your account do the following:

Delivery Method Make sure your delivery method is set to “Accelerated: Show ads as quickly as possible.”

Ad Serving Make sure “Optimize: Show better-performing ads more often” is checked.

Now click on the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of your Campaign Settings page to save these changes.

Setting Your Keyword Costs

When you bid on Google, you will not always pay the price you enter. The price you enter is the MCPC (Max Cost Per Click) you are willing to pay for that keyword. Google is constantly updating the bids for keywords in their search engine. For example if your MCPC is $0.15 and the advertiser in front of you is bidding $0.16 and the Ad one-position behind you is bidding $0.05, you will only pay $0.06 per click, because there is no reason why you should have to pay $0.15 per click if you can get the same Ad position for $0.06 per click.

Don’t set the same bid for every keyword because every keyword performs differently. For example, let’s say you are selling wallets and you can only afford a Max $0.10 per click. Don’t you think if web surfer 1 searches for “Brown wallet for sale”, and web surfer 2 searches for “picture sizes for wallets” and they both click on your ad that web surfer 1 is most likely going to buy a wallet? The chances are that he will. So even if your max CPC is $0.10, don’t be hesitant to go to $0.20 per click on keywords which generate targeted traffic, because they will generate higher than average sales. The same concept applies to poorly performing keywords. If the keyword performs very poorly, then don’t bid the same amount you bid on your best performing keywords.

How Much Should You Bid?

Most online advertisers make the mistake of bidding too much for keywords. Their logic being that an increased bid amount will give you a higher ad position, which leads to more sales.

Unfortunately, spending more money doesn’t mean more profit. For example some people bid $0.10 to $0.20 more per click just to receive a ranking two positions above their previous ranking. These are usually the people who say they spend $500 per day in advertising, yet receive only $550 in sales.

I recommend bidding just enough to receive placement on the first search results page (ad positions 1.0-8.0). This will give you the impressions you need without having to pay large advertising fees. Remember, just because first, second, and third positions are the most sought after; it doesn’t mean they always generate the highest profit. There are other ways to get higher advertisement positions without having to raise your Max CPC. Look at the Quality Score section to see how.

Do not raise your max bid more than $0.20 just because your keyword has a low quality score and isn’t showing on the first search results page. Doing this is a bad move that many internet marketers make. I personally probably only have 1 keyword out of 1,000 that has a max bid of more than $0.20 per click.

What Should My Initial Max Bid Be?

This depends on many things. Some products have more popular keywords which require a larger bid just to be within the first ten search results pages, while other keywords have no competition.

Here is what I do:

When ever I start a new AdGroup I set all of my Max CPC to $0.05, then depending if the keyword has a poor rank, I raise the keyword’s Max CPC to $0.10 per click. I rarely have keywords more than $0.20 per click.

Should You Bid Differently for Broad, Phrase, and Exact Match Keywords?

Yes, you should have different bids for broad, phrase, and exact matched keywords. Phrase and Exact matched keywords are more specific and usually receive a higher sales rate, therefore you can afford to bid higher on them. Broad matched keywords usually receive the most traffic, but are not usually the best performing so I only bid high on the broad keywords that describe my product exactly.

Adjusting Max CPC & URL for Individual Keywords

A quick way to edit individual keyword’s bids is to go to your AdGroup and click on the “Keywords” tab. Then to the left of each keyword you will see a check box. Simply check each of the keywords where you need to adjust the bid and click on the “Edit Keyword Settings” at the top of the keyword list. You will then be taken to a page which allows you to change the bids for your keywords.

Google also offers its advertisers another way to edit the Max CPC and destination URL for individual keywords.

This feature is extremely useful. It is perfect for editing your keywords without having to move them to a different AdGroup or campaign. Notice in the picture above I said that the bid price and custom URL settings were optional. This is because you can change the bid price for a keyword without changing the destination URL and vise versa. Here’s what to do if you want to use this feature:

Keyword **0.15 Sets the keyword’s Max bid to $0.15
Keyword **http://www.google.com Sets the keyword’s URL to google.com
Keyword **0.15**http://www.google.com Sets the keyword’s Max bid to $0.15 and the URL to google.com

What to do with good performing Keywords:

If you have a good performing keyword, you don’t want it to stay just good. Instead you want to make it better than good. You want to make it perfect. You can do this by adjusting the bids of your keywords. If you have a keyword which is making a good profit, it has a high rank, and has a great CTR. Then you can take your MCPC down a little bit, because your quality score should be high enough that if you take your MCPC down one or two cents, then your keywords performance will remain the same, but you will pay less per click, thus giving you a greater profit for that keyword. Before you check to see if your keyword is performing well you will want to see its conversion rate. You can find the conversion rate (the % of clicks that result in a sale) by enabling the Conversion Tracking feature in Google AdWords. I talk more about this later.

What to do with keywords that are barely making a profit:

There are two ways you can fix this. The first is the easiest, and you simply lower your MCPC. This will keep you from spending more money than the keyword generates. The second way is that you create a new ad group with the poorly performing keywords and target the text in the ad towards the keywords. This way you will improve your CTR because people are more likely to click on your advertisement when they see the keywords they’ve searched for in the title or body of your text ad.

Campaign Settings

Google’s Budget Optimizer

Google also has a tool which will take all of the pain out of setting individual bids for your keywords. This tool is called “Budget Optimizer”. Basically, when you have this tool turned on, Google will ask you for you monthly maximum budget (the amount of money you are willing to spend that month) and then Google will automatically and continually adjust the bids for all of the keywords in that campaign. Doing this will “maximize the number of clicks for your ad”.

I have used this tool and I would not recommend it for people who like having control over their account. If you have certain keywords that have a high amount of traffic and even more advertisers, then don’t be surprised if Google sets those keywords MCPC very high so you can receive the most amounts of clicks off of that keyword. If you use this tool and your Maximum Monthly Budget is $1000, expect to receive less clicks than you would if you edited the bids yourself.

In case you’re wondering where you can access this tool, go to “edit campaign settings” and look for the Bidding category.

Google’s Max Daily Budget

I recommend you watch the following video from Google which talks about your daily budget:

Earlier you were prompted to enter the max amount of money you were willing to pay each day for clicks. This is called your Max Daily Budget. Unfortunately, this is usually way off. According to Google you will not spend more than your daily budget over a month’s time. Let’s say that your daily budget is $10, and this month has 30 days in it. You will not spend more than $300 in advertising that month, and if you do, Google will credit your account.

You can set your daily budget anywhere from $1.00 to $250,000.00. If you have your daily budget set low, don’t expect to receive many clicks from Google. You used to be able to set a very low daily budget and receive 200 or so clicks from it, meaning that you could get about 90% of those clicks for free. But you can’t do that anymore. So if you read anything about people making money online by spending only $1.00 per day in advertising, don’t read that material because it is a few years outdated.

Sometimes Google’s Budget can get messed up. For example, your daily cost could be well below your daily budget, but Google stops running your Ads saying that “Your daily budget has been exceeded” (you can see why your advertisements are not being displayed by going to and using the Ad Diagnostics tool). If this happens it means that your account is currently under review. This usually happens with newer accounts, but can sometimes happen when you are creating a new advertising campaign. It should be fixed when a Google account reviewer looks over your account; this usually takes about three days.

Google’s Not Displaying My Ads on the 1st Page

Everyone has some keywords in their account that aren’t being displayed on the first results page (if they have several keywords). The biggest determining factor which makes Google decide not to display your keyword on the first results page is your Quality Score. If your Quality Score is low and your bid isn’t high, then that keyword will not display ads on the first results page on Google. When keywords are not being displayed on the first results page, they are still being displayed in the contextual network. This means that these keywords are still generating traffic in the Content Search. You should be careful with keywords with lower quality scores, because an AdGroup with a large amount of poor quality keywords can affect the performance of your high quality keywords.

Getting Clues

I’ve spent countless very frustrating hours researching poor quality keywords and I have finally gotten to the point where I can understand why a keyword is poor quality based on certain information.

First off, in order for me to be able to tell you why a keyword has a quality score you will need to know what Google is saying about that keyword by using the Ad Diagnostics tool. To do this, go to your AdGroup, click on the Keywords Tab, and then hold your mouse over the button of the magnifying glass next to your keywords. A window will pop-up displaying what the Ad Diagnostics tool says about that keyword. If you click on the “Details and Recommendations” link on the Ad Diagnostics window, it will take you to a page that gives you even more information about the keyword.

Decrypting Google’s Confusing Diagnostic Messages

Now I’m going to give you information that no other guide or source has online. I’m going to tell you exactly how to decode Google’s diagnostic messages to find out exactly why your keyword has a low quality score. Please note the keywords in the pictures I’m showing you below are from my accounts and they will differ from keywords in your accounts, I’m just using the messages Google’s giving me to determine the problem.

The Best Message

This message means your advertisement is being displayed and your quality score is the best it can be. You will receive the most amount of traffic possible.

The Second Best Message

This is the second best message you can receive. It means that everything looks good and is running ok. You will receive full traffic amounts.

Message 1)

This means you’re viewing the diagnostics for a keyword that’s not currently being displayed because of another similar keyword in your account. To view diagnostics, click on the keyword in the account it’s telling you to choose, in this example the keyword was [adwords keyword tools].

Message 2)

This message means your bid is too low for your advertisement to be displayed on the first results page. Increase your bid to have your advertisement displayed.

Message 3)

This means that your bid is high enough to display your text advertisement, but your quality is low for this keyword. Click on the details and recommendations link to further understand why.

This means that your bid is below what Google’s minimum bid is. Click on the “Details and Recommendations” link to get more information and to understand why your keyword isn’t being displayed.

If you received either of the two quality score messages above (with Poor Quality Scores), use the following information found on your “Details and Recommendations” page to determine why your keywords have low quality scores.

Message 3 – Type 1

If these are the details for message 3, here’s what to do to increase your Quality Score.

This means that although everything is good with your website and your account organization, it’s not as good as your competitor’s advertisements. If you catch this early enough (within 24-48 hours of it receiving a low quality score) you can quickly fix it by increasing your bid to 50% more than what the keyword recommends bidding. So if I increase the keyword bid for a $0.30 advertisement to $0.45, within one-three days my bid quality score will improve and my minimum bid will decrease. When this happens I would lower my bid back down to an acceptable level. If you’ve waited for more than 48 hours, then you will need to increase your CTR to increase your quality score.

This is the most common type of quality score message I receive myself. Here’s a real example of this working in my account. The keywords that are marked as a $0.40 max bid were marked with a low quality score 3 days ago with a minimum required bid of $0.30 to get the keywords to be displayed. I usually write compelling text ads that receive high CTR’s so I knew that Google just needed a quick boost in bid cost to get a better quality score status. 3 days later my minimum required bid is at $0.05 per click and my quality score status is “Great”.

Message 3 – Type 2

This is a potentially bad message to be receiving. It means that Google feels this keyword is bad in your account. If you get this message, don’t increase your bid, instead immediately delete the keyword. If you don’t delete the keyword within 24-48 hours Google will look for other keywords in your account that are similar to this keyword and will mark them as poor quality as well. Delete every keyword in your account no matter what its past performance is if Google says the keyword isn’t highly relevant. If you don’t delete these keywords quickly enough, you may risk not ever being able to use these keywords again in the future without them having a low quality score People who keep these keywords in their account will quickly notice that just about every keyword in their account is receiving a low quality score without explanation.

Here’s an example of what will happen. Let’s say John has the keyword “Golden Retriever House Training” and Google says it’s not highly relevant. But John disagrees and keeps the keyword in his account. Three days later John notices that Google has marked all the keywords that contain the words “Golden Retriever” as low quality. John doesn’t understand why, but still just increases the bid and ignores the message. Two days later John sees that his account received only 1,340 impressions when usually he receives 50,000+ impressions a day. He looks through his account and is shocked to find that every keyword with the word “golden”, “retriever”, “house”, and “training” are marked low quality.

If you didn’t delete this keyword soon enough and you’re finding that many of the keywords in your account are low quality, here’s how to fix it. First off, if your account is receiving zero traffic and you don’t really want to spend the time of fixing it, you can immediately start over by creating a new Google Account. If your account has value to you and you want to fix it, you can do so by deleting all the keywords in your account that have this message. Remember to find the phrase or word that Google is using to link the keywords to each other. In the example above, the phrase started off as “Golden Retriever”. You will want to find all of the keywords that are active for search and contain the phrase Google was linking to the low quality keyword(s). Make all of those keywords highly relevant and increase their CTR and bids to make their quality score increase. Keep those keywords well managed for a week or so and slowly begin to add some of the deleted keywords that Google had previously marked low quality because of irrelevant keywords. Make sure the keywords you’re adding stay good quality and relevant. If the keywords you’re adding are immediately marked low quality, you will need to work harder to improve your account history for those keywords.

Message 3 – Type 3

If you receive this message, it simply means that Google doesn’t like the website you’re advertising. Usually it is recommended to find another website to advertise if you’re receiving this message. If you own the website that’s receiving this message it can be a bit of work to get it back up and running, but it’s definitely possible to get the status back up. I would recommend reading the section titled “Quality Score In-Depth” to understand how to fix this if you own the website. If you don’t own the website, then there’s no way you can fix this error message as Google probably won’t even let you advertise the keywords they recommend using cheaply.

Message 3 – Type 4

This message means that you probably won’t be able to advertise that type of product anymore in this account. You definitely won’t be able to advertise the website you were already promoting (unless you want all your keywords to be low quality) but any future websites that sell the same type of product will most likely automatically have low quality keywords as well. Usually when a majority of your keywords receive messages like this, you will want to start a new account. If only a few of your keywords receive this message, then delete those keywords immediately and there’s a chance your other keywords in your account will pull your account through so you won’t have any keyword issues. If you notice that every keyword you add is marked low quality, regardless of the website you’re advertising it means it’s probably time for you to open a new Google account because when that happens it is way too much effort to get your account back running normally.

Message 4)

This message means that the keyword has no past history in your account and Google hasn’t started displaying it yet. Usually you will see this message on new keywords you add in your account. (ignore the quality score part of this message because this message means the same thing if your quality score is Great, OK, or Poor)

Message 5)

This message means that the keyword doesn’t receive enough traffic for Google’s Ad Diagnostics tool to know if your advertisement’s being displayed or not.

If you have low quality score keywords that are too expensive to increase the bid to get better CTRs at a higher position and nothing else works, you should either move the keyword to a new AdGroup and create a more targeted text advertisement (put keywords in the text ad) or remove/delete the keyword(s) from your account and try to re-add them at a later time.

Causes for Poor Quality Keywords

There is no way to know if a certain keyword is going to be poor quality, but if one of your keywords becomes poor quality, it is either because it is completely irrelevant or it is not targeted enough. I used to think that there was no pattern and Google just over judged some accounts, but after spending several months determining this I have found that there is a reason why every keyword is poor quality. There is hardly any chance at all that Google did it by accident.

A completely irrelevant keyword is a keyword which has nothing to do with what you are selling. An example would be if you were selling computers and you had a keyword “satellite dishes”.

Another reason for a keyword to become poor quality is because it isn’t targeted enough in the Ad or website. This means that your advertisement doesn’t relate to this specific keyword as well as it does with the other keywords in the AdGroup. The best way to activate this type of poor quality keyword is to move it to a new AdGroup where the text in the advertisement is more related to the keyword.

What’s An Acceptable Bid?

An acceptable bid varies from person to person and depends on your conversion rate and what you can afford. In Google’s opinion an acceptable bid is where your keyword is on first page results and your quality score is either Ok or Great. I usually never bid more than $0.20 per click (unless I need to briefly do it to increase my keywords quality score). The only times I intend to receive traffic at costs more than $0.20 per click, it’s because I am promoting a more expensive product. If you want to know the absolute most you should bid, there’s a helpful tool that you can use at this website that will tell you the minimum and maximum you should bid for your keywords:

How to Know When You Need A New Google Account

Sometimes it’s much easier and time efficient to open a new Google account rather than fixing your current account. When you open a new Google account it’s a new slate meaning that your new account will not be affected by your old account at all.

Here’s how I would determine if it would be better to open a new Google account or not. If you’ve tried to advertise multiple websites, and all of the new campaigns and AdGroups you create have Poor Quality scores and nearly all the keywords require you to bid over $0.50 to get a first page result, then it might make more sense to just open a new account.

A new Google AdWords account costs $5 to open and Google will allow you to open as many AdWords accounts as you need.

Additional Quality Score Information

Here are some Quality Score facts to help give you more information about how to take advantage of Google’s Quality Score:

• Google knows that the first three ads on each page receive more clicks and a higher CTR and they have put this information into their quality score system. So if you have an advertisement in a top three position you should be getting a high CTR. If you’re not getting a high CTR then you need to increase it. The same goes for advertisements in the last positions of a page.
• After you make changes to keywords within your account don’t expect an immediate change in quality score. If you’re adjusting the keywords/bids in your account by deleting keywords or raising bids you will see changes within 3 days. If you’re having to re-design a website or change text ads then it can take up to 20 days to see changes in your quality score.