Starting small is golden therefore newbie’s performance numbers are usually not big enough. I mean say hundreds of or a few thousand impressions a month, and much much fewer clicks. If you have ever tried to ride a bycicle you know that while it can be pretty easy at a reasonable speed, as you are slowing your vehicle down, balancing might get more and more difficult. A newbie may be in a similar situation if he wants to investigate the relationship between the CTR of a broad or phrase match keyword and its Quality Score. (It’s common knowledge that CTR, or Click-through-rate, is the most important factor considered by the AdWords system in the calculation of your Quality Score. Now we are supposing that the beginner wishes to monitor in his account how his improving CTR will lead to better Quality Scores.)
Paradoxically, he may experience a considerable increase in CTR associated with a worsening Quality Score or vica versa. The reason for it is that the AdWords system only gathers Quality Score data when a user’s query exactly matches the keyword in your account. E.g. in case you have the phrase match keyword “holidays” in your ad group it may happen that 10 users keying in the search query *summer holidays* see your ad and click on it. Say that 10 other users key in the exact search query *holidays* but none of them clicks on your sponsored link. In this scenario your phrase match keyword’s Click-through-rate is a fantastic 50% (10/20) while your exact match specific CTR is 0%. The consequence is that though you have a really high overall CTR, your Quality Score is pretty bad.
It may be frustrating and resulting in a distorted picture. It’s perhaps even more lamentable that you get the least information in this respect in the most sensitive first stage of your learning curve. For this reason I’d advise every newbie to list their broad or phrase match keywords as 2 match types — broad & exact or phrase & exact. That way at least they are likely to grasp more quickly what is happening and why to the relationship between the CTR of their broad or phrase match keyword and its Quality Score.
Note that if the performance numbers are really huge, the above scenario is practically out of question. In such cases when you are improving the CTR of the broad match or phrase match, you should be statistically improving the underlying or embedded exact match CTR as well. However, this post is meant for newbies with low performance numbers.
With regards to the “summer holidays” scenario listed above, a search query report is a must, it can help you to find phrases that you might not have thought of but are triggering your phrase match keywords. You can then drill down by adding these as exact matches and phrase matches as well.
Correct, Andrew, that’s a logical next step. Thanks for the addition.