The new quality score changes have gone into effect on my account tonight. I've been working to replace a successful adwords campaign with a more targeted campaign with several adgroups. My second best keyword had gone down to 'poor' quality on the new group weeks ago, so I paused it hoping to get it back later. Well tonight with the new changes, I thought I'd turn it back on and see what happens. They are now supposed to dynamically calculate keyword quality on each search. I knew this keyword should be good, and it worked! They gave it a chance and within an hour it had 4 clicks on 30 impressions 13%CTR and had been upgraded to 'OK' quality. I also turned on several dozen keywords which had been paused after becoming 'inactive for search'. I think this is really going to help me a lot. I have about the next 2 months work planned out, and I can see it is all going to be much easier now. I'm pleased, although I think there will be some long term ramifications that might not make everyone as happy as I am tonight. I'm thinking it might flood the market a little more, and make it easier for novices to compete with pros. Does anyone else have any sage advise? UPDATE: I unpaused 25 'poor quality' keywords and within 30 minutes 24 of them are now 'OK' and active. One of them is still 'Poor' and active.
From what I've seen in the 20 minutes of looking at my account since the update - if a keyword you're bidding on doesn't have enough competitors to fill the first page, then the bid to get onto 1st page, is the same as what your min bid was. The ball ache, is knowing whether your keyword is actually receiving impressions or not.
muchacho, What do you mean? You should be able to see how many impressions a keyword has had today, or yesterday or whatever. There is a little delay in reporting. Are you complaining about the delay?
No I didn't mean it like that. I mean, not knowing if the keyword is active, without manually checking. Before, you'd knew if it was active, due to it being over the min. bid. Now, you won't know if your bid is above the min. bid without checking the ad is shown.
That's just the point I think. There isn't a minimum bid. Google is trying to raise revenues by allowing more keywords to function. The lower your bid, the lower the chance is that your keyword/ad/search combination is going to trigger an impression. You can still get on page one even if you are below the 'first page bid estimate'. But you can see if your keyword is getting impressions, and the average position it got when it showed, so isn't that enough information for you? Keywords are still labeled 'active'. Also, now the quality score is further broken down to 1-4/10 is poor, 5-7/10 is OK, 8-10/10 is great. I think it is a great change providing more and more relevent information.
There is a minimum bid, at least an implied one. If there is only one other person bidding on a keyword, and you bid £0.01, your advert doesn't appear. This I know - I tried it... So there is a threshold for your bids, below which your advert either doesn't appear at all, or is less likely to appear. Before, we knew what the threshold was - now, we don't. So, you can't bid 'just enough' to make your advert appear, whereas before, you could. This doesn't really affect my clients, as they never appear at the bottom of the search results, but for anybody who deals extensively with cheap clicks, it's a serious issue, I think...
What I'm seeing is that if there aren't enough Ads to cover the first page, then the 'first page bid' is the same as your minimum bid. So surely this means, if your k/w quality score is 10/10 then 0.01 (maybe 0.02) will show, allbeit most probably in the last position. Maybe it's almost as simple as QS 10/10 = 0.01/0.02 min bid ... QS 9/10 = 0.03/0.04/0.05 etc. In a way, it just seems to be the same as before, only we don't know what the minimum bid is, and because of this fact, people will bid more than they need to, in order to appear in the search results - because others will too, up their bid more than needed, the CPC will be higher than what it was. For example, if everyone doubles their Max CPC through fear of not being shown enough, whereas before it might have been something like (for simplistic sake the QS is the same for each advertiser): 1st: Max Bid 0.23 2nd: Max Bid 0.12 3rd: Max Bid 0.05 it might now be: 1st: Max Bid 0.46 2nd: Max Bid 0.24 3rd: Max Bid 0.10 resulting in 1st and 2nd paying a higher CPC than before the changeover. This will mean Google receive more money overall for every click. I've not looked into this change in great detail yet, with other things going on, but my keywords seem to be displaying just as they were. So long as you don't go mad, and know how your keywords are performing, you'll be in control just as you were before.
I raised the issue with my Google contact, who passed in on to the engineers. They've agreed that there's a problem, and sent it on to the 'Plex...
I'm not sure why though. People who are getting cheap clicks are surely getting them because either their QS is superb and/or they are bidding on a niche that doesn't have much/any competition. My keywords that did have min bid of 0.01 are now ranked 10/10 for QS and ones that have say, 0.15 are now around 5/10. Where before we would look to min bid to see if our QS was improving, we now just need to look at the */10 mark. With regards to whether your ad will be shown or not, it seems to me that it's the same as before - although the min bid is now hidden, if you happen to bid under it, your ad won't be shown at all - baring this in mind, I hope there is an easier way checking this without the need to manually check each keyword individually.
Muchacho, I totally understand where you were coming from now, and agree that you are right. It had occurred to me that Google was trying to encourage competition for 1st page placement; but I was so happy about having hundreds of poor quality keywords improve in quality, that just isn't where my mind was. I do agree you are right though. I have a little adgroup that I spend about $15/mo on. Sort of a forgotten project. It has now stopped entirely because my bid isn't high enough anymore.
I'm not sure why your ads aren't being shown anymore - in my account the Quality Scores of my keywords have remained the same, and all are still getting the same impressions with the same average CPC. I can understand if people's keywords went down in average position (as others have dramatically raised their Max Bid through wanting to appear on the 1st page), but as far as I can see, Google don't show Ads if the bid is under the hidden Min Bid .. and show them if it's over the hidden Min Bid. I may be incorrect here and if so, Google may have done a QS/Min Bid reshuffle on some people's min bids - hence why some are no longer getting impressions.
That particular group was only operating on 2-3 active keywords with about 50 paused/poor quality ones. It was almost dead already. After the change, I got about 25-30 keywords to come back to OK quality and reactivated them, but no impressions on any of them now. My bid is .11 and previous to the change, the min bid on many of them was .20 I'm guessing the min bid hasn't changed. My 2-3 working keywords that have quit is not statistically significant and may be irrelevent. But they have been stable for months, and the change seems to have been at the same time. When I considered that people might compete more for page one, it struck me that it may translate into higher adsense revenue for those of us that use adsense. I basically operate on page 2-3 of results, so although it might affect me, I think I'm golden.
Yes, it will 100% help us but it will take some time to follow it by google server. But after some days, it will works fine.
Hey, you'll like this. Min CPC (minimum bids) are still viewable in Adwords Editor http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/ I still do a lot of work online, but fired up Editor to make multiple changes to something tonight. So there you go. If you do a lot of adwords work, you have to try out Adwords Editor. Only thing I don't like about it is it doesn't show the keyword quality although it is reflected in the Min CPC.
Yeah I noticed that in Adwords Editor, but didn't say anything as I'm still expecting that to suddenly disappear any time soon.