Google is Improving Quality Score Statistics to Make It More Realistic

Google is planning to introduce modifications in Quality Score statistics in the coming weeks- Google will release these Quality Score changes to a very small segment of advertisers within the next day or two, so that Google can gather feedback before launching to all its advertisers.

Impact of these modifications:

• Quality Score will now be more accurate because it will be calculated at the time of each search query
• Keywords will no longer be marked 'inactive for search'
• 'First page bid' will replace 'minimum bid' in your account

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/08/quality-score-improvements.html

 

I have to say I'm very cynical about these changes.

Firstly, less savvy advertisers are going to start raising bids to get on the front page when they should probably be bidding using an ROI strategy. Plus new advertisers will most likely now look at the first page bid and set bids initially higher - they won't have any QS built up, so will get quoted a high first page bid then are unlikely to reduce the bid when they've built up some history.

What Google haven't mentioned is whether low volume searches which only have 2-3 advertisers appearing will end up with other, less relevant advertisers creeping onto the bottom of the page. Sure, they're QS might be low and they'd get a low CTR, but with no minimum bids whats to stop them appearing on the front page, even with a low bid? Or will they just not serve the ad - effectively making the keyword inactive but this fact isn't passed on to the advertiser. I mentioned this to google and they assured me this wouldn't happen, but with what they said in the blog I don't know how they can be so sure...

 

It seems Adwords is changing for good as many time they forced me to pay huge money to keep my keywords active,
even though when i could have been on first page will much less bid

Read below post
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/08/quality-score-improvements.html

Now we just have to bid to be on the first page and our keywords will be active with any bids,
And I'm happy for this coz i get same number of sales even when I'm on second page

 

It remains to be seen exactly how this will work out. As Google say, keywords that were previously marked inactive for search may still only accure tiny amounts of impressions. But, here's hoping for some good results from these changes...

 

Holy shot, extremely good news. Really looking forward to this!

 

thats awesome! now i don't have to worry so much about the quality of my keywords!

 

ugh I guess time will only tell if these are good are bad changes for me.

 

whatever seems more profitable...

 

Im fine with the changes but I am concerned on the effect of first page bid replacing min bid. Does that mean no more 2nd page and 3rd page placements? I think both stats should be displayed such as first page bid and min bid because not all advertisers want to be on the first page of results.

Plus min bid is a great way to monitor quality score. If that is taken away, then it will become much more difficult to monitor and examine min QS bid