I seem to spend a vast majority of my time as an Adwords Professional optimizing my Pay Per Click campaigns for clients to improve their quality score, boosting their ad positions and fending off less tuned in advertisers who fall short of the recommendations laid down by Google.
This week sees the release of new improvements to the Google Adwords quality score system. Which I can’t stress enough how much will help advertisers in the future to "get it right" and navigate and optimize campaigns with ease. All of the usual metrics still exist when Google are calculating your quality score, i.e. your campaigns history, landing pages, CTR, ads and keywords are all taken into the mix but now added to this the 3 main new improvements to the system are…
Quality Score through Google Pay Per Click accounts have become even more accurate as they are now calculated in real time – at the time of each and every search.
All of the keywords in your accounts will now be active as the ‘inactive for search’ function has now been removed from the mix.
The ‘minimum bid’ function against keywords in your campaigns has now been replaced with ‘first page bid estimates’ which will give advertisers a quicker more actionable response to those keywords flagged.
So what does this all mean?
The ultimate goal from Google is to improve the search experience by showing only the highest quality, most relevant ads on search pages.
Previously marked ‘inactive for search’ keywords would never show on Google but now theses keywords are all active for search some of these words will start to accrue impressions and some clicks in certain circumstances. This will not drive the most targeted traffic but could open up some long tail keywords that previously didn’t work.
The replacement of the ‘minimum bid’ function with the ‘first page bid estimates’ will give the advertiser an easier view of the bids required to compete in this field whereas before raising the bid from the minimum only gave us the function to activate the keyword with no idea of the ad position, thus making the whole bidding strategy much more efficient.
For me as a Campaign Delivery Manager I feel the improvements can only be a great thing and provide me with more control over my bidding and a much greater insight into the quality of my ads, bidding structure and keywords.
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