Eric asked a good question.
Hi Jay,
How is it that you are getting search impressions without even using a landing page??! I can’t imagine your quality score is very good, is it?
I’ve been trying to do something like this for almost a month, and I have never gotten a single search impression. Whats the trick?
Well, we haven’t been getting that many impressions. For our busiest Video Game Rental ad group we have only 194 Search Impressions. Our CTR however is 5.67%.
Now, CTR is a HUGE part of quality score. Also the destination page content along with the site’s trust level.
Gamefly is a well trusted web site. It’s destination page has links about video games, wii games, ps3 games, xbox 360 games etc…
Now take a look at this quality score below. (Sorry for the small image, click on it to maximize).
One of my CTR’s is 22.22%. All of the scores for this campaign are OK or Great.
However, mouse over the hourglass and we’ll see this.
Google Adwords Keyword Analysis say that the ad is not showing. It states “Your ad shares a similar DisplayURL with a competing, higher ranking ad.”
However it has shown. Just not very much.
Now we could force impressions by upping our CPC however we may have to up it to several dollars (I’m guessing 4 or 5) for it to show all of the time.
Or we could just be patient. It is my experience, although some may argue with me, that older campaigns and ad groups get a bump to their quality score. This is only my theory . It would make sense though. It would give the original advertisers a boost. Also age is always a trust factor in everything especially organic search results.
I think that I can actually get a piece of this Gamefly pie if I let this campaign go for a long time. For now I will leave my exiting bid, keywords and ad groups where they are. I’ll reexamine this in a couple of days. However I think I will start to design my own simple landing page focused on Wii games.
