Google’s quality score is killing me

Sometimes I long for the good old days of paid search, when GoTo.com was the only player, I was one of the only people who knew about them (or so it seemed) and bids started at just .01.

I knew it was too good to last, but prices continued to remain affordable for a long time and even when Google first introduced its veil of secrecy (otherwise known as the “quality score”), I continued to have faith in paid search as the great equalizer of online advertising - that is, it was cheap to start up and almost anyone could benefit from it regardless of the size of their budget. Not no more.

Barrier to entry

In July 2006, Google introduced it’s a new quality score algorithm which dictated some guidelines to advertisers about what Google considers a “useful” destination URL (or not). In fact, I avoided the term “landing page” deliberately because it’s currently going the way of the “doorway page.”

The short-short of it is, that if Google’s automated adBot finds the quality of your keywords lacking (either due to lack of good ad copy or a less-than-useful landing page) you get “slapped” with a minimum bid requirement of $5.00 to $10.00 (in rare cases it can also be about $1.00) which means your keyword remains inactivate and out of the game unless you raise your minimum bid.

Now, fast forward to August 2007 - Google introduced a new and improved Adwords “top placement formula” which they claim gives advertisers more control over achieving a top position in the paid search results, because placement is now dependent on minimum bid and quality score, than on what other advertisers are bidding and actually paying per click for the same keywords. Clear as mud? Check out Gray Wolf’s lucid analysis of the new formula for some clear (and disturbing) insight as to why this is BAD.
A tangible example of why this sucks

I recently restructured one of my client’s accounts because many of the terms were being slapped with $5 to $10.00 minimum bid penalties. I rewrote ads so they were painfully customized, I incorporated language in all the ads to match the landing pages (which were developed specifically to compliment the search campaign) and I happily relaunched everything last week. The main change I made to the keywords was I switched them from Exact to Phrase match because I figured the ads were more customized and would do more screening, so why not go for more volume?

Yesterday I logged into the new account and found that 90% of the terms had been penalized for low quality - again, these were the exact same terms as in the old account with the exception of match type. The ads were more customized and the landing pages had not changed. The campaign was essentially crippled - burning at about 1% of what we’d been spending prior to the restructure.

I activated all the disabled keywords by raising bids the required $5.00 to $10.00 and went back a couple of hours later only to discover that the client’s CPC was, you guessed it, $5.00 or $10.00 - even though many had little or no advertiser competition.

So I paused the campaign and restarted the old one. My old bids, for the most part, have remained intact although the best-converting term is now disabled due to poor quality. I have a call with the client today and I’m going to recommend reviewing landing pages as our next step in trying to combat this issue.

What’s a search planner to do?

I’ve written to Google multiple times to try to get some clarity over this issue and explain that my client is not an affiliate, or a spammer, or someone without a substantial product. In fact, they are one of the biggest publishers of technical and IT books in the world.

Google keeps pointing me to the landing page guidelines and essentially saying it’s up to the client to improve the quality score so we can lower the bid. If they want to bid on the terms that are being penalized, they have pay the big bucks.

I’m on a quest to see if it is possible to raise the quality score based on the nebulous information Google provides to advertisers via the Adwords help and blog. In the meantime, I think the best way to get the CPC down for search is to reallocate funds to Yahoo and MSN, and that’s what I intend to recommend to this client.

Oh, and in case you think I’m just a raving lunatic with a conspiracy theory - Microsoft apparently had this same exact thing happen to them for the term “hotmail” which was being directed to Hotmail’s login page.
And while this new approach may leave advertisers SOL, it’s certainly a happy ending for Google, whose Q3 2007 earnings rose 49%.

Update: Apparently Google has decided to throw us a bone. Thanks to Kevin Gibbons for posting about this on Sphinn.com.

Add comment October 24th, 2007