Another Round of Quality Score Updates

Via the AdWords Blog:

"We're constantly working on ways to improve our Quality Score evaluation and provide you with more information about the Quality Score for your keywords. Over the next week, we'll be releasing two changes focusing on transparency and quality, which I've outlined below:"

Transparency is always good right?

"Transparency - Later this week, we're releasing an optional Quality Score column that shows the minimum bid for all of the keywords within an ad group as well as a Great, OK, or Poor quality label for your keyword. "

Three levels of quality...why not just give us the numeric quality rating? Vague ratings like "great" and "poor" may help some but I really can't see this being overly useful. I know my QS sucks (poor) when I have a high minimum bid, and I know my QS is great (great) when I have a low minimum bid. I guess "ok" could be of some value because at least you know while your keyword may be active there's room for improvement.

"Quality - Next week, we're launching improvements to the Quality Score algorithm that sets minimum bids for keywords in order to improve the quality of ads that we serve to our users. These changes should make it easier for high quality ads to enter the auction while also discouraging low quality ads."

It'll be interesting to see what this update considers "low quality" ads. Could this be the end of "find anything at eBay" ads?

"First, we're improving the way that we set minimum bids for keywords where we have limited data. For example, if the system does not have any data on a keyword, we'll try to assign that keyword a lower initial minimum bid until we have enough data to make a more accurate assessment of the Quality Score for that keyword in your account."

Thumbs up here. I use a lot of long tail keywords and from time to time they get hit with high min bids right from the get-go even though I'm doing everything right in terms of keywords/ads/landing pages. The min bids eventually come down to reality - hopefully this change will eliminate this adjustment period for long tail low volume keywords.

"Second, we're improving the Quality Score algorithm to make it more accurate in predicting the quality of all ads. This will improve the overall quality of ads that we serve by lowering minimum bids for high quality ads and raising minimum bids for low quality ads. We expect that the higher minimum bids for low quality ads will reduce the number of low quality ads we show to our users."

This will be interesting to watch. In my opinion the AdWords system has historically been almost worthless when it comes to predicting anything relating to impressions, clicks, prices or bids. Maybe this change won't follow that pattern.

Here's the full post, I only commented on certain sections.

Usually after quality score related updates start rolling out the forums start buzzing with all sorts of feedback. I'll keep my eyes open for anything interesting and will get something posted as feedback starts to surface.

If you're an AdWords user...good luck, hopefully these changes will be positive for you:-)