Nothing frustrates a marketer more than when their golden keyword, that is, in fact, their product or service, has a quality score of two or one from Google, usually accompanied by this lovely message: “Rarely shown due to low quality score.” When you click for more info on how to fix it, Google says the keyword just is not relevant and you should delete it.

Outrage!

Can’t Google see this keyword is in all of my ads and it’s all over my landing pages? This is the core of my business!

How could this possibly be?

With a little investigation, we usually find that proper account structure and maintenance have not been in place, and have left the advertiser in a punished state — Google has effectively issued a restraining order and your ads are no longer allowed to show up within the search results page for that keyword.
Being in the above situation is quite challenging to dig yourself out of, so first let’s cover some ways to avoid it:

1) Don’t bid on a single term broad match if you don’t have a very robust list of negative keywords defined. The result of having a single term broad match is that your ads will get lots of exposure to searchers who aren’t searching for what you have to offer – which in turn means lots of ad impressions and no clicks. The only conclusion Google can draw from this type of performance is that the masses have voted – and you are not relevant.

2) If you see a keyword that is accumulating a lot of impressions – let’s say 1,000 (be sure it has a decent average position) but it’s getting a very low number of clicks or no clicks – less than 0.25% CTR, say – pause the keyword and do your homework to figure out what’s up. Maybe it needs a different ad? Maybe you need more negatives? Maybe you are grasping at straws and the keyword is not truly relevant – PPC advertising is not a great medium to change people’s minds.

3) Don’t let low quality score keywords dominate your account. Your account quality score is like your reputation with Google. If you allow your account to be filled with junk, Google will be more inclined to think you are not a quality advertiser, and punish your quality score overall – which costs you money.

What if you are already in this situation? What can you do?

Getting a restraining order reversed is no easy task, but you might start here:

1) Separate out the keyword in question (with robust negatives) into its own ad group with some new strong ads and bid aggressively.

2) Forget that keyword for a while and bid on other long-tail keywords with this term inside of them and get your traffic that way while boosting your reputation with Google.

If you need further help, give our Customer Success line a call at 1-877-943-5379, and we’ll do our best to steer you in the right direction.