My ads in my most recent campaigns had been suffering from issues of not being displayed. Googles pop up bubbles simply suggested improving the quality of the ad and/or raising my bid to improve my quality score. It took quite a bit of reading through Google’s documentation and a few outside sites before I figured out what I needed to raise my quality scores. Here is the nutshell version based on my personal low N dataset of experiments with AdWords. I hope this will save you some time and pain.
- Make sure the keyword’s you’re trying to use are in the ad text somewhere.
- If your keyword is ‘blue baloons’, make sure that that phrase shows up in your ad text.
- Make sure the ad copy relates to the copy of the page you’re driving traffic to.
- If you’re driving blue balloon traffic to a landing page that talks about red watermelons, you’ll get dinged.
- Make sure you’re not overlapping keywords.
- If you use a broad search for ‘blue balloon’ (no “s, ‘, etc) don’t then include a search for “blue balloon” (phrase) or [blue balloon] (exact match) as the broad search will include the others.
- Similarly adding long tail keywords when you have a broad search that includes some of the terms in the long tail doesn’t seem to play nicely either.
I made the changes above to my own advertising efforts and am now landing a much higher ranking than I was before. Additionally all of my ads are now being shown.
Good luck and happy advertising.
-Karl
