A great many companies rely on Google’s AdWords system to bring users to their sites. Last month, Google revamped its AdWords Quality Score — and on Monday on its AdWords blog announced that it will be launching a promised change to AdWords system that will take effect in all advertisers’ accounts in coming days.
The vital change the company announced Monday has to do with how it calculates the AdWords Quality Score, which helps determine the order of each ad for a given keyword. Google said that it will now calculate quality in real-time as a Google user performs a search, along with its current practice of analyzing click-through rates. Google also said that it will less frequently analyze landing page quality than previously.
However, Google still did not mentioned about turning on old accounts when they stop the inactive status, but they have given more details on how the Quality Score is measured including all of the CTRs in your account. This may force people to be a lot tighter with the keywords they add to their accounts so they do not have to pay higher rates for their established terms.
According to AdWords blog, below are answers to the most common questions, in each of these three areas:
Quality Score
Many advertisers wanted to know specifically how this launch affects the way we calculate Quality Score.
The change adjusts Google’s calculation of advertiser’s quality score–a key factor in determining how much the advertiser must bid to ensure ads are placed next to search results. With the new system, quality is calculated at the time a Google user performs a search, though historical data such as an advertiser’s click-through rate still factor into the equation, Google’s Trevor Claiborne said on its AdWords blog on Monday.
“We will still consider your account’s history, which consists of the clickthrough rate (CTR) of all the ads and keywords in your account. We will also consider your landing page quality. Although your overall Quality Score is evaluated at the time of each query, landing page quality is evaluated less frequently.”
The front page bid estimates that will be replacing minimum bids also have some interesting new details:
For queries without many advertisers competing for placement, the first page bid estimate should be relatively close to your existing minimum bid. However, queries with a high level of advertiser competition may have significantly higher first page bid estimates, because you will likely need to bid above the old minimum bid to rank higher than your competition and show on the first page. Remember that you can bid less than your first page bid estimate and still show on subsequent pages — as long as your keyword is relevant to our users.
Advertisers familiar with the competitive landscape for their keywords may indeed notice that the first page bid estimates provided are in line with the CPCs that they had been bidding to appear on the first page prior to the release of these Quality Score improvements, although this is not a given.
Given the size of the industry that has grown up around Google’s search-ad system, any changes can cause indigestion in the search-engine marketing (SEM) business. Google tried to encourage people to look at the big picture, though: “These improvements are part of a continuing effort to deliver relevant ads to our users, and also to provide you with more control over your bidding and more insight into the quality of your ads and keywords,” the company said.
Google is also eliminating its “inactive for search” moniker for those keywords that would yield few (if any) impressions. The company said that all keywords are now available on Google.com and although the company said those keywords will probably still yield less than ideal results, they may add some impressions for those sites using them.
Google did not give any word on exactly when the new system will be rolled out, but it should happen over the next few days.