Have you ever improved your Adwords quality score only to see your ad positions drop, your cost per click increase, and your ctr to go down?

It’s one of those strange phenomena – like lowering your bids and seeing your average cost per conversion increase – that we Adwords managers have to get our heads around.

For the last few years, I’ve been explaining this with a long-winded description of how you end up with higher positions for expensive cpc keywords, extra impressions for lower-relevance searches (with lower ctr)… and so on.

Yesterday, I came across this article by Craig Danuloff that has a very neat analogy based on keyword ‘magnetism’:

The Unexpected Consequences Of Higher Quality Scores

Ultimately, you need to focus on profit first and foremost. While clickthrough rates, ad positions and cost per click are important, the real question is whether you want this extra traffic.

Or, to put it another way: ‘Profit before metrics’.

Steve

Categories: Quality Score