A colleague of mine recently has had some problems with a new Google Adwords account that he setup for an Auto Dealership. First I’ll give you a brief overview. This company sells used autos and has their full inventory online. Basically the goal of this account was to bring in traffic not necessarily some sort of conversion.

This is how the account setup looked:

• National Targeting & Geo-Targeting
• Use of Broad, Phrase and Exact Match Keywords
• Keywords that were bid on also matched on page copy
• Tested variety of landing pages including homepage and results pages

After launch it was noticed that the quality score for landing page relevancy was awful for all campaigns. One phrase that was bid on was 5 words total and also had the matching phrase on the homepage itself assuming that the quality score would be good; this didn’t help at all.

What was concluded to be the problem?

It wasn’t our landing page quality which was “good” so that could be scratched. Instead after working with Google on this, there were 2 problems:

• Poor Overall Quality History
• Visible URL Performed Poorly

How could this have been avoided?

Many times as search marketers we like to copy similar campaigns that might be running well to another account and make small tweaks. When this is done, keyword and creative history is retained so you will still have the same quality score.

When this account was setup there could have been more optimization such as watching the campaign closely and weeding out low performing keywords or ad copy so that the quality history could have been reversed before things got to this point. It’s still possible to do this once the campaign is has run but it certainly would be easier if caught early on. A second approach is to start this campaign over with a new account even though the “visible url” history will still be influenced.

The main takeaway from this experience is to take the extra time in prepping your account as opposed to tweaking a campaign after its run for an extended period of time and facing high CPC rates as well as poor quality overall and a negative visible url history.