Unmasking the Abomination of Quality Score

Posted onApril 24th, 2010 byadmin

Dear Quality Score Victim,

I have to admit: I’ve been dying to write an updated piece about Quality Score (QS) since 2 years ago. The game has changed forever and I’ve spent more time gritting my teeth and cursing at my monitor (logged into Adwords) than ever before. The reason is because we were told quality score was to help ‘reward’ advertisers for constructing highly relevant campaigns and adgroups. But its all different now. Where’s the reward?

When QS was first introduced to advertisers in 2005, it was just a static score used to determine the minimum CPC based on the ad relevancy to its keywords. Over the next five years, Google would add in: CTR, landing page relevancy, account history (a combine average of all CTR’s in an account, and (the best part) “other relevant factors.” I’ve always gotten a big laugh out of “other relevant factors” because as I would dissect QS, I could see there was much more unexplained reasoning for low quality scores.

An Illustration of Traditional Quality Score (Pre-2009-2010)

In August of 2008, Google restructured QS and made it a “real-time” score that would take effect as soon as someone searched on Google. Some of the other differences Google made were: replacment of minimum CPC  to “first page minimum bid”, landing page quality, and landing page load time. In expectation of a rough change to quality scores, we were surprised that existing advertisers who had been advertising a while, didn’t really see much change…until 2010. Now we go into the accounts and look around at QS but we’re not in Kansas no mo.

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Google Is On The Move Again. Are You Coming?

Posted onJanuary 6th, 2010 byadmin

Google Caffeine and Google Merchant Center is Stirring Up the Pot for Advertisers.

When it comes to Google Search, it becomes increasingly obvious that it’s evolving faster than ever. Advertisers who make a living from either natural search or paid search (or both) are now being forced into evolving with it. If you haven’t done anything NEW with you search marketing in the last year or so, you’re probably in for a rude awakening. Google Caffeine 2010 and the new Adwords updates are basically what’s taking off and leaving lazy, conventional advertisers in the dust.

Caffeine is the name of Google’s new method of ranking websites that has been in beta since last summer and has been tested on at least one of their known datacenters on IP: 209.85.225.103 since then. With it, come some new changes in how Google prioritizes websites. This week, Google is said to be officially rolling out the new changes on a permanent level. At this time, we will be conducting thousands of keyword tests to update ourselves on what strategies we will take to leverage these changes.

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