Google updates Adwords PPC Quality Score - introduces Quality Score column

February 20th, 2007

Google has recently announced a number of improvements to the Google Adwords “Quality Score”, both in terms of reporting and the Quality Score algorithm itself. This should have significant effects for Pay-per-click specialists.

The two revised changes that Google will be introducing are as follows:

• Greater transparency - via the introduction of a new Quality Score column within the Adwords interface. This will include showing a minimum bid and as well as a Good, OK or poor label for the applicable keyphrase. You can select this column by clicking the ‘Customize Columns’ option in one of your ad groups (selecting this will also automatically populate the column for all other ad groups within that campaign).

  The quality label will provide a quick overview of the quality of your keywords, or alternatively provide you with the minimum bid for a granular understanding of your Quality Score.

  Remember, the lower the minimum bid is for a keyword, the higher the Quality Score, and vice versa.

• Quality - will also be improved as part of the new improvements to the quality score algorithm. Google have introduced minimum bids for keywords to improve the quality of the ads. This should in theory make it easier for high quality ads to enter the auction while also discouraging low quality ads.

  “First, we’re improving the way that we set minimum bids for keywords where we have limited data. For example, if the system does not have any data on a keyword, we’ll try to assign that keyword a lower initial minimum bid until we have enough data to make a more accurate assessment of the Quality Score for that keyword in your account. Second, we’re improving the Quality Score algorithm to make it more accurate in predicting the quality of all ads. This will improve the overall quality of ads that we serve by lowering minimum bids for high quality ads and raising minimum bids for low quality ads. We expect that the higher minimum bids for low quality ads will reduce the number of low quality ads we show to our users.” - Google Adwords blog

To read the full post go to http://adwords.blogspot.com/2007/02/quality-score-updates.html or the Search engine land post

Entry Filed under: SEO Industry, Search Engines, SEO