Thought I’d share this with you…
We have been doing PPC for a fairly long time, and have been using just a single account for our affiliate marketing, company marketing, product marketing, basically everything.
Obviously we have had separate campaigns etc. structuring all our campaigns nicely, multiple adgroups, single keywords etc. targeted ads etc. etc.
As some of you know, quality score has taken on a fairly important role on the relevancy of your ad, your minimum bid, CPC and where your ad will position.
Recently we’ve been testing some very broad keywords with targeted ads, which has basically meant we have a very low CTR with high volume.
Guess what this did? Brought down the overall performance of the entire account.
Then I went to do some highly targeted keyword advertising in a very competitive niche…
BOOM $6.50 minimum bid…
I sat there like WTF…
So I tested the exact same campaign/adgroup/keyword/ad/url structure in a new account (everything identical)…
Minimum bid… $1.30…
Are you kidding me!
This account is like 3 or so years old, and I have now effectively STUFFED it for getting low minimum bids.
I tested this a lot of times between these two accounts, and the difference was anywhere from 65.78% to 500% cheaper…
So now I’m going to be registering a new account with the same keywords and keeping things very targeted within the same account.
I think that the quality score takes into consideration the past performance as well as the number of varied topics.
What does this mean?
If you’ve got a PPC account that you’ve sort of played around with, or you have a main account and want to test some other stuff… DON’T
Setup a new account just for testing, and keep your main account only for that which matters.
For me… lesson learnt.
Daniel
Popularity: 55% [?]
This is data I collected from another online marketing service. You may already know this Daniel; however, others may read and benefit from it if it is true information. I believe this is along the same idea as you state.
Google keeps a historical record of the performance of your account overall. Thus, if you started with adwords and created campaigns that had poor click through rates, that will be used against you in the form of higher minimum bid prices.
Likewise, if you used the conversion tools within Adwords and had very small or no conversion rates at all, that will most likely be used against you too.
The best course of action is for you to delete your account. Yes you can do that. Then just create a new one. The best thing is to get natural traffic to your keywords then create a Google Adwords account.
An idea you may like, and maybe even heard of. Have an Yahoo account for advertising, and a Google account for AdSense revenue. I haven’t seen the latest stats, yet I think Yahoo has about 20% of the search engine market, and lower prices, than Google. So if you advertise with Yahoo you still draw traffic, yet you don’t have to pay as much. Then you can still make money using Google for those that chose to click on an ad.