Stop the Madness
It’s been two years since Google’s last groundbreaking announcement that they intended to change the rules on us regarding quality score. And what fun times those were! A few months after the new landing page algorithm was incorporated (in July 2006), I had campaigns where 75% of the terms were suddenly slapped with $5.00 and $10.00 minimum bids (in most cases, inexplicably).
In fact, I’m starting to feel a bit jaded and neurotic. What will this new change mean? Isn’t it contradictory to everything they’ve been saying related to each new “improvement”? How can I best explain this to clients?
It then occurred to me that the best way to get a handle on what the current changes may mean, is to look at the history of changes in the past.
Adwords - A brief History
July 2005 - The Quality Score is Introduced
This is when Google replaced the static minimum bid of .05 with a variety of minimum bid price points which were based on relevancy (as deemed by Google’s Quality factors) - Here’s a good chart that demonstrates the key factors in Google’s quality score before the August 2008 change. By the way, Google cited this change as something good for advertisers because it gave them “increased control.” Before the quality score, Google would have varying phases of keyword approval that included “on hold”, “in trial”, or “disabled” keywords. Setting minimum bids at varying prices (Google argued) gave advertisers control over turning poor-quality terms on or off. But for many advertisers there was no real choice - a term pegged with a $5.00 or $10.00 minimum was too expensive to keep live.
December 2005 - Google introduces landing pages into the quality score equasion
This actually made a lot of sense. Relevant landing pages are important to a good search experience. The main issue I had with this was that pages created for Google campaigns were now often hit with quality penalties - kind of how Google frowns upon doorway pages in organic SEO. My feeling is that if I’m paying for an ad, I should have have the ability to create landing pages specifically for that ad.
July 2006 - Landing page quality update
Although landing pages were being factored into overall quality score as early as December 2005, the algorithm was “improved” in July 2006 so that they (the landing pages) impacted your minimum bid. This had disastrous results in many cases.
November 2006 - Landing page quality is extended to contextually targeted ads
The answer to arbitrage? A way to control the quality of those parked domain sites that are just a repository for Google ads? Probably - and so I didn’t worry too much about this one. Also, this change only affected minimum bid amounts and not ad position. Google’s advice was, “It may be instructive to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and closely examine what it is that leads you to explore and do business with a site rather than simply click the “Back” button.”
February 14, 2007 - A day of love, and more quality score changes
Google introduced more transparency to advertisers regarding keyword quality score. Now you could actually see what your minimum bid was to activate the term (no, you couldn’t see this originally!) and also glean some basic idea of what Google thought of the term (Great, Good, OK, Poor). Google also changed the quality score algorithm at this time, factoring in overall history for new keywords into the initial minimum bid, and not assigning quality to new keywords prior to the keyword accruing some history in the campaign.
August 2007 - Change to top ad placement formula
Google now put more emphasis on maximum bid for achieving premium ad placement, so that if you wanted the top spot, you could basically bid higher prices to be there. This was probably Google’s reaction to advertisers who tended to bid close to the minimum bid price. Now the top position was based more on how advertisers below you were bidding (a flashback to the true “Overture” style of auction-based bidding). But since quality score still factored into ad positioning, this didn’t really provide the additional control Google claimed. It just made everyone anxious and fueled higher CPCs overall.
March 2008 - Landing page load time incorporated into quality score
This one’s pretty straightforward. If you had a slow loading page, the time had come to fix it.
August 2008 - All hell breaks loose
Google anounced some new quality score “improvements” that include eliminating the minimum bid requirements, introducing a “first place bid” which (I’m assuming) replaces or augments the “top placement formula” introduced last August and figuring out quality scores in real-time, rather than basing them on historical campaign or account data and Google’s own history of the term. What does this mean??
I honestly don’t understand how quality score can be determined on the fly and not based on history. I don’t know what “performance” even means in the context of Google’s new announcement. I think this effectively removes the transparency Google briefly introduced in February 2007. We’ll now have to guess at the maximum bid amount and I imagine there will be a lot of head scratching when (for example) a keyword that seems highly relevant isn’t getting any search volume on Google. What can we do when that happens? Raise bids, I guess.
Google is once again touting this change, which seems to contradict all previous changes, as “better” for advertisers and (of course) Google’s users because it will allow them to show more relevant ads. Oh really? Relevant based on what? That’s not entirely clear. Personally, I base relevancy on conversions - CTR is a false metric. Anyone who has seen success on the content network can attest to that.
Do us all a favor, Google. Don’t tout these changes as better for everyone when they are untested and unclear. Perhaps they’re better for you, but that’s an entirely different post.
Add comment August 24th, 2008