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Google introduces dynamic quality scores

October 9, 2008

Google is aiming to improve ad relevancy and deliver more qualified leads to advertisers by making significant changes to the mechanism for calculating quality scores.

Let’s begin by looking at just what the quality score is. It’s a metric that is assigned to each keyword in your campaigns to determine the relevancy of the keyword to the search term. The calculation is based on a number of factors such as clickthrough rate, ad text relevancy, landing page relevancy and historic performance. The quality score dictates your minimum bid and ad position.

Until recently, the quality score was calculated daily using averages. But now it is re-calculated instantly whenever a search term is entered, giving advertisers the most accurate and up-to-date information about the keyword’s performance.

This leads on to two more significant changes.

If your maximum bid for a particular keyword was lower than the minimum bid required for the ad to appear, the keyword was flagged “Inactive For Search”. This indicated that the keyword had a low quality score. Under the new regime all ads will now be active all the time. This means that whilst the quality score is low, there is at least some chance that your ad may display. But there would still be little likelihood of much traffic because the ad would not rank highly.

The other change is that ‘minimum bids’ will now be replaced with ‘first page bids’. So now advertisers can see what they must bid to achieve a first page display rather than just keep the keyword ‘active’. The effect of this may be that we see advertisers increasing bids to ensure first page positions, thus pushing up costs for everybody. Having said that, don’t rush out and start increasing your bids straight away. Check to see what positions you are achieving with your existing prices, as we can not be sure of the accuracy of the recommended ‘first page bids’, certainly in these early days of the new mechanism.

Filed in: Pay Per Click