Occasionally I can actually find time to work on my own AdWords campaign. And like everyone else I have to work with, in, and around the infamous Google AdWords quality score.

 

And like everyone else I come up with some real head scratchers occasionally. Here is a good example.

 

I have a FaceBook keyword campaign. In one of the ad groups, I bid on the keyword(s) — [facebook ad management]. So obviously I was disappointed and a little irritated when I saw that Google had determined that my quality score for that keyword was 2. 

 

Hang in there, I promise this will get interesting in just a couple minutes.

As any Google rep will tell you, the quality score is primarily influenced by CTR, but is also affected by ad copy, and website landing page. Since the CTR for this one was pretty good (11.11%)…the ad copy and the landing page must really be bad….well take my word for it, the ads were OK and in fact one of them actually had the terms FaceBook Ad Management in it, so we are probably not too far off there. 

Normally when you get a 2 quality score something has to be really bad. So I slid my mouse over the little dialog box in the status column and got this typical message:

So the Google AdWords algorithm has determined that the relevance for that keyword is poor. It must be that the relevance for that keyword to my landing page is very poor….right? (Remember that the CTR was pretty high, so the ‘relevance’ to the searcher must be OK).

 

Here comes the head scratcher…..if you do a Google search on the exact term FaceBook Ad Management you will see that my site comes up high in the organic search results….in fact at the time I wrote this blog it was in the #2 spot.