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.

According to the Adwords Blog

Today, we began rolling out improvements to the Quality Score algorithm, which will update the Quality Score for keywords in your account over the next 3 to 4 days. As I mentioned last week, the goal of this change is to improve the quality of ads that we serve to our users by making it easier for high quality ads to enter the auction while also discouraging low quality ads. In addition, this change improves our ability to set minimum bids for keywords where we have limited data. As a result, you may see the minimum bid for your keywords increase or decrease based on the updated algorithm.

I haven’t seen any effects of the changes yet but here is a WebMasterWorld thread tracking its effects on people’s accounts. Please let me know if you’ve seen any changes whether good or bad in your account.

]]>

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]

]]>

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.

Google‘s introduction of the “Quality Score” is a ever concerning issue for paid search managers mainly for the lack of transparency that it offers. While score 1 for Google as they are making an attempt to correct the issue by providing us an actual quality score on the KEYWORD LEVEL. The screenshot below indicates a new column in the Adwords reporting interface. This is a pretty exciting change if they decide to go through with it. It will allow account managers to properly analyze how each word appears to be working rather than having to make broad account changes. While it appears to be a very general rating between “Poor” and “Good”, its a step in the right direction.

*hat tip: Belsky*

This is something I was meaning to post last week, but I was busy slaying Tuna in the North Carolina Outer Banks, but alas I am back and hard at work here.

Google announced last week that they will be updating how adwords evaluates landing pages. There are two points to take away from this announcement:

1. If you use content network, they will be incorporating landing page quality across contextual targeted ads

and

2. The algorithm for evaluating landing pages is being “improved” but will not affect most advertisers.

It seems to me that with #2 they are placing more relevance and importance on the content of a landing page, which means if you don’t have good content on your landing pages, you better get on with updating it if you don’t want your bids to increase.

As always, landing page quality will not affect your position that you are bidding for, but it can affect your minimum bid. Adwords uses the landing page quality factor along with quality score in order to determine an advertisers minimum bid.

*I didn’t even think about the effect this could have over advertisers right before the holiday season, although I don’t think it is going to be a big deal, people are already chastising Google for this move. Here is a Roundup on the Topic