I watch our company’s current Adwords account very closely and yesterday I was surprised to see that all of our campaigns had stopped running. Drilling down into the ad groups, each of the keywords were “inactive” for search. Our maximum CPC is usually set to $.40 per click, but Adwords was recommending that we increase my Maximum CPC to $10.00 per click!

I spoke with a Google Adword’s support specialist and she explained that it was my quality score that had affected the Maximum CPC. I assured her that our ads were well targeted, but she was insistent on trying to “enlighten” me how Google Adwords quality score works. By the end of the phone call she had agreed to have a technical team member look into it further, but I would have to increase my Maxiumum CPC if I wanted my ads to appear.

This morning I checked our Adwords campaigns and they were back up and running without any changes. A few hours later I received this email from Google:

“As we discussed yesterday, your keywords were listed as inactive due to the poor Quality Score of your keywords. I realize that this was very
concerning for you, and that you had some questions about why your
keywords had a poor Quality Score. After reviewing your account with our technical team, they have determined that your keywords received a poor Quality Score as a result of your landing page quality.

However, while your landing page quality was found to have impacted your ads’ ability to run, I’m happy to report that our technical team investigated your account further and noted that your page was not correctly evaluated by our system. We’ve fixed this error, and you should
see improvements to your Quality Score soon, reflected by lower minimum bid requirements for your keywords. I did also take the liberty of reviewing your account, and see that your ads are now running and your Quality Score has improved for many of your keywords.”

Did any of you catch that? The reason why the ads were paused was because of the poor quality of our landing pages…however, after investigating the landing pages Google found that they were actually not correctly evaluated by their system and they corrected the error.

Just one more reason to monitor your Adwords accounts closely… and notify Google if you spot any anomalies!

Monitor Your Quality Score:

If you want to monitor your own keywords Quality Score you can do so by clicking on:

Campaign-> ad group-> Keyword Tab->

Click on the “Customize Colums” link

Choose “Show Quality Score” from the drop down list and then click the “done” link.

If you are not happy with your Quality Score I would suggest checking your keyword relevance, your landing page bounce rate, and your conversion rates. If they all seem to look good, I would contact Google and ask them to investigate.

If I can get a better explanation on how Google calculates Quality Score I will let you all know.