You've read the AdWords Strategy Guide and Advanced Guide. You have implemented all the techniques to get to a Good Quality Score. But, AdWords has still assigned you a Poor Quality Score. What do you do? The following list of items are the things you want to check to raise that poor Quality Score.

(1) What is AdWords saying is wrong?

AdWords provides some diagnostic information when they assign a poor Quality Score. Take a look inside AdWords and see why AdWords gave you the poor score. When you know what Google thinks is wrong, you can attack the problem. AdWords reports on three categories of problems.

(a) Keyword relevance

Generally this means you have a poor CTR. More on how to fix it in a moment.

(b) Landing Page

This means your Landing Page is not tailored to your keyword. Create a unique landing page for your keyword and optimize the page for it.

(c) Landing Page Load Time

Your Landing Page was too slow. Start removing images, javascripts, stylesheets and any other elements not directly related to your message.

(2) How is the CTR of the ad?

Once you begin to get traffic (impressions) of your ads, the CTR becomes a major factor in the quality score. Google is letting the human consumers determine if your ad is relevant to their searches. If the ad is relevant, human consumers click your ad and the CTR goes up. If the human consumers don't click your ad, the CTR goes down. Google alters the quality score based on the CTR. It's a survival of the fittest ad when you begin to get impressions.

The rule is you must have a half percent CTR to maintain a Quality Score. But, I recommend shooting for a 2% or 3% CTR. If you don't have a CTR of at least 0.5% you should do one of the following...

(a) Improve the sales copy of the ad.

This is crucial if you want to keep the keyword. Your ad needs to be compelling enough to make consumer want to click it. If you don't have a 0.5% CTR your ad isn't doing it's job.

(b) Increase the max CPC bid.

You can increase the max CPC to get a higher ad position. A higher CPC bid means higher ad position, more traffic, and (hopefully) more CTR. After you have achieved a CTR of 2 or 3% for two weeks, you can start lowering you CPC bid because the CTR is likely boosting your Quality Score, and you can maintain the higher ad position without spending as much.

(c) Delete the keyword.

The Quality Score of your entire campaign can be damaged by poor performing keywords. Delete them if you can't keep the CTR above 0.5%.

(3) Revise your Landing Page.

Can you optimize the landing page more? I assume you have the keyword in the page title, meta tags and heading tags. Have you used it throughout your sales copy as well? AdWords likes to see the keyword in the content. Assuming you have read the Advanced Guide, you can still use PHP to dynamically insert the keyword just like you did for the page title and meta tags.