Does Google Increase Keyword Quality Score with Time?

I have several ‘small’ campaigns on Adwords that I experiment with, trying to find the perfect combination of high average placement coupled with low cost per click.  Because I have yet to amass the wealth it would require me to compete effectively in the niches I desire, I must rely on good content, decent ad copy and really really trying to figure out what Google is doing.

I have launched campaigns recently supporting some products that I am selling though an affiliate network and to keep my cost per conversion low, I need to have a relatively small bid (CPC).  I usually start out at a nickel until Google has had time to review and approve my ad text and my keywords.

The scenario generally is this:

1. Create the ad and populate the keyword selection (CPC set at .05)
2. Wait a day for the Adwords system to review and assign quality values to each of my keywords.
3. Find out that my bid is nowhere near high enough to appear on the first page.
4. Tweak the campaign over the next few days and then just letting it sit.

At this point I often move on to a new campaign and work at adjusting landing page content, ad content, a tighter keyword selection hoping to have better success than before.

Recently, I noticed that a couple of my nickel campaigns were getting average placements over 5 and my ad impressions were beginning to add up.  And yes, I had received a few clicks as well.  Why was this happening?  I hadn’t changed a thing on those campaigns in months… hmmm, maybe there is something here that I haven’t paid attention to before?

Does Google Increase Quality Score with Time?

With renewed excitement that I had a nickel campaign actually generating some affordable traffic ( my quality score was around 7 for each keyword in my campaign … “I knew I was adhering to Google’s recommendations!!”) I set out to ‘optimize’ the campaigns….. uh oh

Here are the changes I made:

1. Adjusted a variable in the landing page (nothing big or deceiving, just a variable name… same page and everything)
2. Added Google’s opportunity keywords to my list… why not… Google says they will help my campaign.

The Next day… crappy quality scores in the 2′s for keywords that were in the 7′s less than 24 hours prior.  Now, as disappointment set in, I was happy that I felt I had another window into how the quality score is derived.  My guess is that with the edits, the campaign became ‘new’ again and its running time had been reset to zero.  I would need to build up some history in the Adwords program again to win back my quality scores.  Why does this make sense… organic results are determined in a similar manner.  Older more established pages generally have more search engine authority than newer pages. Domains that have been purchased for over five years gain more authority than those who are consistently in their expiration year.

It is likely that Google understands that many of us run quick campaigns in an effort to promote a single product or ‘try’ out some tactic in an attempt to make fast cash.  Generally these efforts don’t serve the web user and the ads we create can clutter ‘real’ marketing efforts for products and sites offering a true service.  Those ‘quality’ companies probably have a steady budget applied to their campaign and it runs for an extended period of time.  Therefore we can make a small assumption that if a person or company is willing to devote regular amounts of cash towards a campaign over an extended period of time, it could be interpreted as more legit, or of higher quality.  Thus the increased Quality Score of its keywords, higher average placements, and lower Cost-Per-Clicks.

I checked a couple of my other long-running campaigns that had started out with poor quality scores and I had just let them pass into quiet darkness… yep… higher quality scores.

So, If you are having difficulty increasing your Quality Score on Adwords, leave it alone for awhile and give it some time.  You may be surprised what happens next month.