The Real Ryan J. Parker

Is it just me, or is Google AdWords quality score really just a way for Google to demand people pay a higher price for clicks while they can hide behind a veil of “sorry, your quality score just isn’t high enough”?

Since last month I’ve been running an AdWords campaign for Which Team Wins?, and every couple of weeks I notice some keywords going inactive for search because they’re now priced higher, while quality scores go from Great to OK to (in some cases) Poor.

I’m still pretty new to the AdWords game, but based on a little Googling the only thing I can find is people having the same problem.

My pages are exactly relevant to the keywords I’m targeting, as I want to send people looking for Dallas Mavs stats to the Dallas Mavericks Stats page, but Google doesn’t think the quality is good enough (meaning it’s not relevant to the user).

This is a bit absurd, and I’m going to research more into this problem when I have the time, but for now some keywords are going to stay inactive. In my case I get a strong feeling of price gouging, and I don’t like it.

If you’ve had good or bad experiences with Google’s quality score I’d like to hear what you think, along with any ideas as to why my score for some pages keeps dropping.

Tags: google, adwords, quality score