Google Updates Its AdWords Quality Score….Again. Goodbye Min Bids?
Yes, the title is correct, but don’t hold your breath just yet. The new roll out is only going out for initial beta testing “to a very small segment of advertisers within the next day or two, so that we can gather feedback before launching to all our advertisers,” says Trevor Claiborne, a member of the Inside AdWords team.
So what is involed? What are the new changes going to do to jack up my minimum bids now? According to Google - nothing! So what’s the catch?
This new tweak to the thorn in all of our sides just may ease the infectious results that have been coming on gradually. Minimum bids have just been bumping up all over the map, irregardless of industry, CTR, Quality Score or even account history. In removing the AdWords minimum bid structure, Google still isn’t willing to take us back to the more auction-style bidding system we were so fond of. And they aren’t necessarily going to start showing your ad again all of a sudden just because the playing field has been brought back down to ground floor.
As part of this development, the search Goliath is also “replacing [their] static per-keyword Quality Scores with a system that will evaluate an ad’s quality each time it matches a search query,” potentially indicating that Quality Scores will become far more dynamic. Yeah, ’cause that’s what we all needed, more dynamicism and increased ambiguity.
The good news is that the keyword status will not display different information, specifically a “more meaningful metric: first page bids. First page bids are an estimate of the bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of search results on Google web search,” which I certainly perceive to be a tremendous benefit. Additionally Claiborne adds that “[t]hey’re based on the exact match version of the keyword, the ad’s Quality Score,” most advertisers, including professional search marketers, haven’t seem to have caught on to.
Finally, the one benefit that I am willing to get excited about IF (wow! what a big IF) this means 2 things:
- It may be easier to improve a Quality Score faster if you can string several quality days worth of CTR together, and
- Even if a keyword or ad is still unjustly handicapped by the remnant of the minimum bid philosophy, at least it may still show somewhere down the line if displaying on the first page is of a lesser concern.
Tags: AdWords Minimum Bids