Dynamic Keyword Insertion Now a BAD Thing?!?

[szetela]

Folks,

The Ad Groups of mine that are most badly affected by Adwords' new "Quality" ranking are those in which I'm using dynamic keyword insertion (e.g. {KeyWord:Top Brands}.

The account is for a retailer who sells thousands of brands.

In each of these ad groups, 90-100% of the keywords are now inactive, and the new minimum CPC's are 200%-1000% higher than our previous bid prices.

Given the fact that one of the main Quality factors is the use of the keyword in the ad text, perhaps this means that Adwords does not interpret dynamic insertion as inlcuding the keyword?

Seems like our only recourse is to create thousands of ad groups - one for each brand name.

Surely there are others in the same boat - what are your thoughts/experiences?

Thanks,

David

[andrewgoodman]

I am using dynamic keyword insertion widely and am not seeing low quality scores as a result. I have seen no change in pattern on that front. Others?

[AussieWebmaster]

If you double check is there any possibility that some of these brand names exceed the 25 character limit?

Also are the brand names really short? If that is the case you should have other words in the line... too short is nearly as bad as mistitled.

[eWhisper]

The use of dynamic insertion doesn't automatically give your ad the quality score for adding all keywords in that ad.

Google only considers the keywords in the the backup copy (i.e. {KeyWord:Backup}) as the keyword for that ad and how it determines the quality score.

[dgrumbli]

I use a large number of dynamic insertions and have not seen a major impact from the new changes.

Originally Posted by eWhisper

Google only considers the keywords in the the backup copy (i.e. {KeyWord:Backup}) as the keyword for that ad and how it determines the quality score.

Does this mean that if I have five words in an ad group that I should use the highest CTR word in the group and it will improve the position of the other 4 words in the group?

[eWhisper]

Often, but not necessarily.

There are several factors used in the quality score, keywords being one of them. I would suggest using each of you keywords in turn and seeing which has the lowest max CPC.

I would also suggest looking at the ad copy itself to make sure it reflects some theme about those keywords.

Of course, a catchy title is still very necessary as a high quality score doesn't do a lot of good without actual clicks.

[spamfork]

I'm experiencing the exact same problem and I’m frustrated and spending less and less with Google as a result. We've always used dynamic insertion in our description and/or sometimes our title for extremely big sets of keywords. Before quality score, we could keep keywords alive at a decent price per click. Now even though our keywords typically have no other bidders, our minimum bid required is 400% to 1000% more than we were paying. Now there is no ads showing for many of our terms and the organic results are less relevant that our former ads. The new inflated bid price has no potential for ROI positive, so we can't do it.

While it makes sense to not assign "quality" algo points to dynamically inserted keywords (b/c it's notoriously used by ebay affiliates and Adwords spammers etc), we are now forced to create separate AdGroups for each keyword instead of one AdGroup with 1000's of keyword. Keep in mind that in the end the ads will be the same, but the quality algo will see things differently. It seems foolish to load up all that extra data on the AdWords system and it’s not going to be efficient for Google or us.

One might think that quality score should encourage advertisers to build effective ads that drive the most clicks and cash for Google while attempting to preserve the end user’s overall impression of the ads and the continued desire to keep clicking. It’s a balancing trick that isn’t properly scored yet. They want advertisers to include keywords in the ad b/c it encourages folks to click. But they don't want junk keywords to dynamically appear in the ads at the same time. Folks using dynamic keywords pointing back to search results pages that pass those keywords (like on ebay affiliate) erode the end users perception of an ad being of quality when it contains the keywords within the ad text. Overtime this will likely cause end users to click less often unless we find a way to push junk out while allowing true quality dynamically inserted bids to survive.

Perhaps Google could push some quality score points for dynamic keyword insertion when the landing page is an actual relevant page and not a list of search results. Even that has flaws. Maybe it comes down to “request a quality score rep point” or something. Anyone have any thoughts on what could eliminate junk dynamic spammers while still allowing the non-junk advertisers with big keywords lists to continue using dynamic insertion without paying junk advertiser rates?