It’s obvious that you have thought long and hard about QS. The process you describe certainly will help prevent QS and overly-cluttered-account issues that might arise from aggressive keyword expansion segmented or otherwise.

There’s still the problem of competing against advertisers with (sometimes sloppy and irrational) match settings attached to high-volume informational terms. This phenomenon can drive up costs in segmented auctions. Any thoughts?

When we do drill far enough into the long tail, mechanical or just low search volume to the point that QS is an issue, we have dozens of “friends” “around the world” click search for our uber-long tail words and click. We stagger the times, locations, etc…over a couple of days. Hmmm. No QS problems anymore.

I would suggest that everyone consider one more element when assembling keyword groups according to intent, geo or any system of organization.

When exploring the long-tail, keep in mind that you will be competing with broad matched on less specific (and more expensive) terms. So don’t be frustrated when your hyper-relevant ad appears in low positions for full max-cpc price. The way to combat this is with quality score. If your keyword cluster is relevant to your client’s offer, but relevant text doesn’t exist on your site or in your ads, your AdWords listings might not receive the QS necessary to make the intent segmentation exercise successful.

I believe too much attention can’t be paid to landing page and ad text specificity in discussions about keyword strategy. so I just wanted to share

QS and relevance issues are surely covered at length at aimClear and elsewhere, but it’s always good to remember that keyword tools and Excel concatenations used without caution can cause QS issues.