Google’s Offi­cial Line

The team under­stood that the cam­paign would be impacted as a result of the land­ing page changes. What was sur­pris­ing was just how dras­ti­cally the front end met­rics fluc­tu­ated from his­toric per­for­mance. It seemed strange and con­cern­ing that some­thing as sim­ple as a URL change could reap such havoc with performance.

Google con­tin­ues to be elu­sive and vague about Qual­ity Score but the fol­low­ing quote can be found in the AdWords Help Cen­ter:

“There may be instances in which you need to edit your ad (e.g., you may need to change a price or date). Go ahead! You may see some fluc­tu­a­tion in Qual­ity Score, but this shouldn’t last long. If the ad isn’t sig­nif­i­cantly dif­fer­ent it’ll likely per­form sim­i­larly to how it did before, mean­ing its posi­tion will ulti­mately stay the same.”

It should be noted that the ads were exactly the same as pre­vi­ously, it was only the des­ti­na­tion URL and dis­play URL that were being changed to com­ply with URL poli­cies. The ads how­ever per­formed noth­ing like they did before with met­rics drop­ping sharply, even on strong branded key­words with CTRs of over 20%.

The Google Rep also shared the fol­low­ing feedback:

“Anec­do­tally I have seen the recal­i­bra­tion process take 2–3 weeks on aver­age (longer for lower-traffic ad groups/keywords). Also, I did have a chance to check with our spe­cial­ists this after­noon and they said all signs point to this being a nor­mal effect of switch­ing out the des­ti­na­tion URLs; i.e. the sys­tem is work­ing as intended.”

Man­ag­ing Qual­ity Score

At a recent Google event in March 2012, Google’s sub­ject mat­ter experts con­firmed that CTR con­tin­ues to be the main dri­ver of Qual­ity Score. When mak­ing large scale changes to ad copy in your AdWords account, keep the fol­low­ing in mind:

• Remem­ber, when changes are made to any ad, that ad is deleted, along with all the his­tory of the front end metrics
• Qual­ity Score is a real-time met­ric and it is not pos­si­ble to pull his­toric per­for­mance reports for Qual­ity Score
• To under­stand how Qual­ity Score is being impacted, pull a key­word level Qual­ity Score report before major changes are made. This will serve as a his­toric baseline
• In the same key­word report cap­ture your avg. CPC, impres­sions, clicks, CTR and avg. position
• Mon­i­tor the account closely and watch for a sud­den drop in CTR as this may be reflec­tive of poorer avg. posi­tions, dri­ven by require­ments to raise avg. min­i­mum bids.
• Run a report on key­words that are below avg. first page bid and deter­mine where to increase bids.
• Focus on key­words that have his­tor­i­cally been strong per­form­ers so that busi­ness level KPIs are not impacted by a drop in key­word performance
• Work towards build­ing up CTR as this will help lift Qual­ity Score values
• Keep a close eye on the account and make grad­ual but con­tin­u­ous changes

What is most impor­tant is to be pre­pared for a drop in per­for­mance. If man­aged prop­erly, the impact should be tem­po­rary and you should be able to work back to pre­vi­ous KPI met­ric lev­els.

Depend­ing on the scale of changes made, the account may take 2–4 weeks to normalise.

Man­ag­ing an AdWords account is not an exact sci­ence because every account is dif­fer­ent. Under­stand­ing the rela­tion­ship between the var­i­ous met­rics and how they impact one another will allow you to more effec­tively con­trol changes in them.


Biography / Resume : Marta is the Group Manager of Performance Media at Mediative, specialising in paid search (PPC) account management. She drives PPC strategy on several key accounts with multi-million dollar investments. She also ensures PPC projects across the company are meeting KPIs and exceeding client expectations, in addition to identifying new opportunities to grow each client’s digital footprint. With a background in marketing and economics, Marta has an intuitive understanding of clients’ business goals and is adept at identifying the strategic foundation of the project, while possessing the technical skills to manage the tactical analysis and execution of PPC campaigns. Having lived in various countries around the world, Marta’s accent is as linguistically dynamic as the many industries in which she has managed PPC campaigns in the B2B landscape.