Another point, after the quality score arrived it is becoming more and more important to do SEO as well as PPC. Gone are the days when you had a crap flash site and you could just do PPC instead, as now your quality score would be highly detrimentally damaged if all the content was in flash or images, as it would perceive it as not being relevant. After all the quality score is not a manual scoring, you could have all the relevant words on the landing page but in an image and your quality score would be affected..

Two more points i wanted to add:

I was helping a friend find out why his campaign was penalised after changing his destination urls from his vendor’s site to his own(he’s an affiliate). And I spoke to one of my friends in Google, only to find out that over and beyond considering your on page content relevancy, Google also counts in the quality of your outbound links. No surprise to some of you I presume, but add to that that your whole domain can suffer from one poopy page – and it gets a bit scary…

The second thing I wanted to mention, is that you could consider using DKI to improve quality score, but not only at the ad stage. If you load up individual destination URLs (different landing pages) for each keyword, whilst using DKI – you can have even more targeted campaigns – i.e. better QS.

Great post, Julie )
P.S. So totally know what you’re feeling with the pudding there. I hate it when my pudding dissapoints… I have been known to sulk through wattery eyes!!!