Don't Be A Miser With Adwords, Or At Least Don't Show It

By Author: Giotto De Filippi
Total Articles: 12
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The quality score is a really complex black box algorithm, there are many things that it takes into account.

Here is for example something that is very far from being intuitive or obvious:

If you just added a keyword and you bid a very low amount (seems to be correlated with what the cost of being displayed on first page will be) you may end up getting a poor quality score, and of course its not going to improve immediately if you then increase the bid later on.

The logic behind it seems to be the fact that if you add a keyword and you bid a low amount (lets say $0.05) it means that you believe this keyword not to be higly relevant and your thinking is simply that if its cheap enough it may actually be profitable, no matter if its relevant.

A good trick is to bid a high amount, like $1 or more when you add the keyword. Then a few seconds later check the quality score it gets, and just lower the bid to whatever amount you want.

So if you want to bid $0.05 on a keyword, dont ...
... add the keyword with that bid amount, add it with $1, let AdWords calculate the quality score (usually takes a few seconds) and then lower the bid to the amount you want. If you were to add the keyword with the low bid right away you would end up getting a lower quality score.


Giotto De Filippi is an expert consultant with both Adwords and SEO. He writes on his blog PPCHACKING.COM giving advanced tricks about how to get better results with Adwords. A lot of emphasis is put on the Quality Score technology Adwords uses. He has 10 years Internet Marketing experience and has worked both for very large corporate clients and small to medium business - consistently achieving noticeable improvements for his customers.