It's been quite a debate for a while now – should you consider keywords as separate entities with regards to quality score?
Do keywords with a low quality score create a bad neighbourhood for all others?
Should you ditch lower performing keywords? And are your keywords solo or team soldiers?
Well it appears that keywords are team players, they do influence each others quality score and you should consider dumping keywords with a low quality score as they can have a negative effect within the ‘hood!
How do I know? "“ well a combination of first hand experience, talking to Google and through fellow SEM pros.
Ask Google
During a recent visit to Google London, I asked these very questions and the answer I received was pretty straightforward and went something like this:
AdWords quality score is housed at an account level, with keyword quality scores having an accumulative affect on the overall account quality score. And the account quality score also has an impact on a keyword’s quality score.
What can we learn from this? Well it is safe to say that keywords with a lower quality score can have a negative influence on neighbouring keywords and that they aren’t solo soldiers "“ they are team players and if one gets hit by a low quality score then they all feel the pain to a certain extent.
First hand experience
Over the last year I have seen patterns to suggest that an account with a good account quality score, receives favourable quality scores for newly added keywords.
An example of this would be an advertiser that has a heavy part of their budget allocated to brand terms and has a particularly good account quality score.
As new non-brand terms are added, their associated quality scores are often very good initially and then slump after a while – kind of like a honeymoon period.
My take on this is that Google uses the account's overall history until the keyword has had time to build up its very own history and then allocates more weighting to the keyword’s quality score rather than the overall account quality score.
Has anyone else had similar experiences?