The web is a buzz with news of the Google Adwords Quality score update. So far none of my clients have been affected so I can’t personally say what everyone is all torn up about but there is a 6 page (and growing) thread on WebmasterWorld regarding the change.
People have been complaining of keyword prices jumping up to 20x their original cost and quality scores going from ‘Great’ to ‘Poor’ at the same time.

Loren at SEJ has more coverage

According to Google, only a small number of AdWords advertisers will notice an increase in their minimum bids and the majority of advertisers will not be effected.

Publishers however are sounding off in forums (and these publishers probably have much more aggressive AdWords campaigns than the majority of AdWords advertisers)

Unfortunately, the Google Adwords blog has yet to mention any news of the update but I’ll keep an eye on it if anything changes or they decide to speak up.

Here is some interesting coverage from the Advanced Paid Search Tactics panel. This is interesting not only because it has some good information but particularly because I know how stingy ppc account managers are with their true “tactics”, not many of us like to give them out. While there is nothing ground breaking here, I will try to find more coverage on this panel. View Panel summary at SERoundTable

Here’s another session talking about the conflicts of internal PPC problems. It’s not too interesting to me but those at the agency level may want to check it out at SERoundtable.com

Unfortunately, I am not at SES NYC this year but with all the great coverage done by the blogosphere, I’ll probably read and absorb more than I would from being there. I digress, I will hopefully be able to grab all the relevant paid search coverage and post it here. If time permits, I’ll try to add my thoughts as well.

The first session on Ads and Quality Score was covered in great detail by Barry on SERoundtable.com (Actually it turns out to be Lisa from Bruce Clay, guest posting.) Irregardless of who posted it, there is some good info on it Ads and the effect the Quality Score can have on your keyword buys. There is a good discussion on the panelists thought on quality score and how to manage it, but in particular the commentary from Jonathan Menedez was particularly interesting to me.

While you can no doubt spend hours upon hours analyzing data in hopes to cracking the quality score beast, but Menedez puts it best. He says:

Jonathan warns audience members about being too concerned with their score. … If you concentrate your efforts on delivering relevancy through your keywords and your ad, your quality will improve and so will your results.

This is confirmed by Nick Fox from Google who was also on the panel and says

Google is trying to do with their quality algorithms. Don?t worry about quality score, just focus on relevance and everything else will follow.

Lisa reports

Nick assures readers that it?s the users who are defining quality. Click through rate is a great metric to see if users are demonstrating interest. Google is trying to capture the essence of what users are telling them about relevance and then incorporate that into the algorithm.

. While CTR is definitely a good metric, it is also important to track your exit rate in conjunction with CTR to make sure you aren’t attracting low quality traffic.

For more coverage visit Lisa’s post on SERoundtable.

I posted about this a month ago and to prove to you I wasn’t making stuff up again, here is the official announcement on the Adwords blog.

This is nothing but a good thing as Google aims to give us a little more transparency in our accounts, making it easier for advertisers and account managers to effectively judge performance of our keywords without a mystery factor hanging over our heads. Granted it is only a 3 point scale (poor, ok and great), its much better than what it was before, nothing.

One thing that is going overshadowed in this annoucement is the note that Google will lower minimum bids on keywords with little history. This is especially great for those of us who bid on longtail keywords. Here is the quote from the Adwords blog:

“For example, if the system does not have any data on a keyword, we’ll try to assign that keyword a lower initial minimum bid until we have enough data to make a more accurate assessment of the Quality Score for that keyword in your account.”

Good stuff Googlers. Good stuff. [More on Techmeme]

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Shoemoney posted this article about how he bolded keywords in his Adwords ads and increased his clicks by 25%.

In theory he is exactly right, having bold words in your ads will definitely increase traffic but only to an extent. I also don’t believe his > reason is exactly the reason why he saw an increase in traffic. Any Adwords rep will tell you they recommend using keyword insertion in ads in order to help increase CTR. Keyword insertion helps customize the ad towards the users actual search query by inserting the search query into the ad in bold. This helps draw the users attention and also helps your ad stand out. In the example he used “Google search for Shoemoney, you can clearly see how his ad stands out. No other advertisers who are bidding on this keyword have a properly organized account or focused ad, so Shoemoney’s ad really stands out. Take a search such as Life Insurance and you can see how many ads have bold words and where I doubt using his “>” technique would increase your clicks 25%.

So What Does this mean for me?
Well, first I completely agree that using bold in your ads will help your CTR, clicks, quality score, etc but the key question is how to do it. There are 2 ways to achieve bold words in your ads, you can do one of the following ways:

I’ll go into more details on these two in upcoming posts, they both deserve dedicated posts to fully understand them.

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I already despise the Google Quality Score for its lack of transparency as I believe its a way for Google to hike up bid prices. Well, apparently Yahoo thought it was a good idea because starting Feb. 5th paid search ads will be ranked using an “Ad Quality” ranking.

According to the email Yahoo sent: Here’s a quick summary of this important change:

• Both bid amount and ad quality will determine an ad’s rank in search results beginning February 5, 2007.
• This will replace the current method, in which ads in search results are ranked by bid amount only (bid-to-position).
• This is designed to allow you to focus less on competitive bidding practices and more on the quality of your ads.
• By improving the quality of your ads and making them more relevant to users, you may be rewarded with a better ranking and/or a lower cost for your ads.

The email goes on to talk about how the Ad Quality will work

Example of How Ads May be Ranked
The graphic below helps illustrate a scenario that may result from this change:
New Ranking Model

What is “Ad Quality”?
Ad quality is determined by:

1. The ad’s historical performance – its click-through rate relative to competitors and normalized for position.
2. The ad’s expected performance – determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo!’s ranking algorithms, relative to other ads displayed at the same time.

Overall ad quality is displayed in graphical form by the quality index.

Other Important Things to Know

* We recommend that you review your current max bids. Keep in mind you may be charged up to this amount. Learn More.
* Standard match type ads will no longer receive priority placement over Advanced match type ads. Learn More.
* Fewer Sponsored Search results may now appear at the very top of the page for certain search terms.