Hi all,
My post today covers a less discussed but critical aspect of  how pay per click account history can affect the Google Adwords quality score. The ppc account history of your campaigns is the recording of the clicks, costs, CTRs and all other performance factors relating to your ads from the date of inception of your Adwords account to date.

Good targeted and relevant keywords are vital to the healthy performance of any pay per click campaign. Not all keywords are created equal. In a campaign, some keywords outperform the others. It is a publicly discussed fact that poorly performing keywords can bring down the quality score of an otherwise decently performing campaign. The crux of the issue is: Is it wise to delete the poor performers or move those keywords to new ad groups under new ads?

Every keyword has a performance history against its name and Google keeps track of all the changes made to PPC campaigns. This importance should definitely play an important role  in the success of  the campaigns of which a good quality score is an integral part.

If a poorly performing keyword is moved to a new campaign or ad group and a separate ad and landing page is created to improve its relevancy, then the history of that keyword is undisturbed and still maintained in the Adwords system.

The moving of keywords can be done using a cool Google desktop application called Adwords Editor that lets you download an entire PPC account to your hard drive and you can edit and make all required changes offline and upload it to the live Adwords network. Moving keywords also strengthens the fact that Google tends to favour accounts that have been active for a longer period of time with an accumulated performance history.

If the intent behind moving keywords in a campaign is to improve relevancy, then it should not be a detrimental tactic as Google always endeavours to provide relevant results to user searches. Thus even a poorly perfoming keyword can lift its performance when it is targeted better and its quality score goes up over time.

The other option is to delete and reinsert keywords. The biggest problem here is that when a keyword is deleted, it loses certain parts of its performance history for good. When it is revived in a new campaign or through a new ad group in the original campaign, it starts from scratch with a clean slate.

There is no guarantee it will improve drastically even if it is given a new lease of life from Google’s own admission about keyword deletion and reinsertion. Google confirms that even if a keyword is deleted, the Adwords system still maintains its old quality score at the time it was deleted and assign it to the newly revived keyword.

It is now a matter of testing the keyword that is up for deletion. If you move it to a new ad group and increase its relevancy and targeting by optimising the ad of which it is a part and a good quality landing page and use a phrase  match or exact match, then you can gauge its performance.

If the CTR of the keyword does not improve, then it will be a good idea to delete it as improving the quality score by way of increasing its relevance has not helped in improving its CTR. The problem is inherent in the keyword itself as users are either not interested in it or there is not enough demand for a product/service the keyword represents.