Usually, when Google updates or makes “improvements” on their Quality Score, advertisers can easily see that they changes are being made more to increase profits for Google under the guise of “a better user experience.” This time though, it actaully seems like there’s a possibility of their changes actually helping advertisers.
Late yesterday afternoon, Google posted on the AdWords Blog that they will be rolling out new updates to the way they calculate Quality Score. They will be making 3 specific change:
- Quality Socre will now be more accurate because it will be calculated at the time of each search query
- Keywords will no longer be marked ‘inactive for search’
- ‘First page bid’ will replace ‘minimum bid’ in your account
Here’s an example to illustrate how per-query Quality Score works:
Nancy’s Dairy advertises on the keyword ‘milk.’ Nancy’s ads perform better on the keyword ‘milk’ in the U.S. than in Canada. Her ads also perform better on the query ‘milk delivery’ than on ‘milk,’ and better on certain search network sites than on others. Instead of one static Quality Score and minimum bid that determines whether the keyword ‘milk’ is eligible to trigger an ad for all search queries, we will now determine eligibility dynamically, based on factors such as location, the specific query, and other relevance factors. For that reason, Nancy’s keyword ‘milk’ will be able to trigger an ad for search queries where it’s likely to perform better, i.e., in the U.S., on ‘milk delivery’ and on certain search network sites.
Quality Score Calculated for Each Query
Currently, your quality score could get updated frequently, but still not on the fly like these new changes will start doing. It will be interesting to see how this change affects volume and click quality. I’ve got some ideas on the affects, but I don’t want to speculate too much before I have a chance to see the changes first hand and try to dissect the update. It seems that this change could be positive or negative depending on how Google actually decides to implement it.
Keywords No Longer Marked “inactive for search”
This update should have a positive affect for advertisers by giving them a chance to get more volume from their keywords. Even though I doubt most will see a huge increase in traffic, as Google states, a small increase is better than none. This may also end up increasing CPCs for certain keywords or searches since there will be more competition for each search.
“First Page Bid” Will Replace “Minimum Bid”
I’ve got a lot of hope for this one. It’s a huge pain when Google decides to tell you that you need to pay $1.00 or even $10.00 per click for a keyword to show up. It was even worse when you actually DO bid that much, you may end up showing in position #2 when you’re sweet spot is between position #5-7. From the way it sounds, this new “minimum bid” should be a lot more reasonable than the arbitrary and excessive $5 or $10 min bids currently plagueing Google’s system. Instead of bidding to just show up and be positioned randomly based on where you fall in the Bid x QS equation, this should help advertisers who want to still get 1st page volume without showing up too high.
Overall Thoughts
These changes will most likely increase costs like they usually do, but they also seem to give advertisers more freedom in their ads. One implication could be thatit will be more difficult for companies that are well known in one region to advertise nationally because geographically, users within their region will click on their ads more while users in areas that the company has less presence may end up clicking on ads for a company better known in that particular area. This could make it more expensive for a regional company to expand out to other areas. These changes may also allow smaller advertisers to start competiting against the bigger players in the space by placing less restrictive limitations on how to get their ads to show up.
Just like with everything else in search, we won’t know for sure until we test and see results. Until then, everything is just speculation.
One piece of advice I have though is that Nancy’s Dairy, from Google’s example, should probably examine the value they’re receiving for the keyword “milk” because unless they’re the National Dairy Council, they probably shouldn’t be bidding on the keyword.
Related Articles:
Quality Score Changes (Bid Taxes Going Up?)
Google AdWords Now With Real Time Quality Score, First Page Bid & More
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