The importance of Google AdWords history

MindValleyLabs have performed an interesting experiment which they’ve wrote about in their how new Google AdWords get crushed post.

The purpose of this is to address a common question for new AdWords advertisers which is why are the traffic levels so low? To answer this they paused their own AdWords campaigns and created a brand new account using exactly the same set-up with the only difference being that the new account wouldn’t have any history. The results showed that the amount of impressions and clicks dropped massively, with the difference in performance shown in the image below.

They also highlighted the main reasons why history so important to the amount of AdWords clicks:

• “In Google, everything is based on the Quality Score which is a combination of how your ads have been performing over time relative to ads of the competition.
• Ads with a higher quality score will get surfaced more often and have a dramatically lower required bid minimum. When we drilled into the new Google AdWords account we saw bid minimums that far exceeded the maximum bids that we used previously. So, if your account has no history, you might have to spend extra to establish a good history by bidding high just to get started.
• We also know that ads with a higher click-through-rate will have a higher quality score and that ads that start appearing in a higher position will have a higher click-through-rate because people click on more links that appear higher on the page. So, once again, new Advertisers will have to spend extra to quickly drive up the Quality Score.”

I only found the MindValleyLabs blog last week but they have some excellent posts about Google AdWords which are definitely worth a read!

Struggling to make your online marketing sparkle?

If you liked this post, you'll love what we can do with your SEO, PPC and online marketing campaigns. You can have the authors of this blog work directly on your campaigns!