I'm beta testing the New Quality Score Column: it shows the min bid, even the keyword is active and the Quality Score status (Great, OK, or Poor). Here follows the help documentation:
Hi could you tell me how I could activate this column? Is it only being displayed on certain accounts right now and will be open to every advertiser only later?
Its only available to a very few accounts - I have been invited by phone some months ago to be part of the test.
Wow! I was waiting for it and its there. Will contact my google representative to see if I can get a invite for testing.
What's great? It doesn't give you any useful information. What's so great about just knowing that your score is poor or good?
Yeah... and I will bet you $100 that no matter how many times you change it you will get stuck in a never ending circle of bad scores and $10 bids
The problem is, it doesn't show you anything you don't already know. If you bids are low, you already know it's great. If your bids are $10, you know it's poor. Google is really just throwing us a bone here with something that is purposely vague. They can't give an exact score because that would reveal too much info to spammers. This is more of a PR move than anything.
the new quality score colums does help. it allows advertisers to a/b test landing pages to improve quality score as opposed to creating landing pages and having no idea if they adhere to quality score. Your landing pages are not only to improve quality score. they are to improve sales conversions and userbility. So there is a balancing act in terms of quality score adherance and sales conversion.
I am looking forward to this information as it will be helpful in some cases in determining a change might be in order. In all cases it is not clear that the quality score is the primary reason for a specific set of circumstances. It is not terribly granular, but more information is always better.
man i wish i had this going in my account knowing what the QS is towards a word or ad can help us greatly as publishers.
Sure, every little bit helps. But my point was that if you are savvy with Adwords, you can already judge your QS to the level of accuracy that a 3 level rating gives you. I talked to a googler at pubcon a few months back about this coming out and he explained that they are really caught between a rock and a hard place with this. They realize people are frustrated with the whole black box nature of the QS so they want to help legit customers with some insight. But if they provide them with any really valuable QS info, it will be exploited by spammers. So they are testing the waters with this simple rating. Hopefully it will lead to more detailed stuff in the future.