Hi – I am working for an ecommerce company. We have some product categories with only a few products (and are adding more soon but not sure when). Currently we do not have campaigns running because of the threat of high bounce rates.

Is it better to start the campaign and gain CTR history (meaning bounce rate isn’t as important for QS) or should we hold off to make sure the Bounce Rates do not affect the QS

I would say to restart the campaign advertising only the products that your website can currently support. That way you avoid the high bounce rates (which AdWords does not care about) and you avoid spending money to attract potential customers who will leave your site unhappy–which AdWords does care about.

Make sense?

Hi Yes that makes sense but also I am in a unique business model where the only objective is growth (visits & orders) so any traffic is good traffic, and there are so many products/product types that it can be built anytime Budget is not an obstacle…

If adwords does not care about high bounce rates, how do they measure the customers that leave our site unhappy? It seems this would be the exact metric to indicate that so I was a little confused there.

So it all boils down to: Is QS related to your ads, CTR, and getting visitors? Or does it go a step further to take into account bounce rates & website experience?

Hey,
Bounce rates do not directly affect quality scores, and neither do unhappy visitors. As long as your site is okay in terms of policy, you don’t have to worry.

On the other hand, I understand that your campaigns will produce a loss which is thought of as an investment in a good history to improve quality scores for later use – I’d advise against that. You don’t know whether the history will really improve your quality scores compared to the scores that Google would use without a history. Only if you are able to exceed Google’s expectations this will help.

If you are willing to spend money to get the campaign running, I’d say do that when you start for real. Instead of spending money now without generating any conversions to speak of, just save it and use it to bid higher when you really start. In case there is really a quality score disadvantage it would be offset by the higher bids.

HTH
Martin