Yesterday, Google announced more changes to the way the calculate your quality score and how they show ads. There have been good points made on the PPC Book and on SE Roundtable about this so I’ll just sum them up the biggies.
- The Ad Position part of the algorithm will be updated. They don’t really say how it’s being updated or how it exactly worked before, but hopefully, they’ll look at historical CTRs of each position for each search or at least each keyword.
- Ads with a higher CTR are more likely to show up in the yellow bar now than before
The 2nd one seems like it could be big news. Previously, if an advertiser bid high enough to start overtaking some of the top positions, but didn’t yet accumulate enough CTR history to show up in the yellow bar, all of the ads would only be shown on the right side (reducing clicks for everyone). Now, Google is saying that even if the ad ahead of yours doesn’t have a high enough CTR to show up in the yellow bar, but your ad does, you may end up getting shown ahead of your competitor - in the yellow bar.
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