August 26 2008

Google moves to real time Adwords quality scoring

The search giant is tuning its Adwords programme with on-the-fly evaluation of keyword quality scores

Google is soon to further adjust its Adwords programme in its never-ending quest to deliver more appropriate ads to users and better leads to advertisers — as well as minimising the amount of ad money it leaves on the table.

An announcement on the Inside AdWords blog reveals that keywords will no longer be marked 'inactive for search', 'minimum bid' will be superseded by 'first page bid' and, most importantly, ad quality scores will be calculated on the fly.

Until now the 'quality score' which determines how relevant your ad is to a particular keyword (and therefore when and where it is to be shown) was calculated daily and applied to all searches. Real time quality score calculation will allow Google to pull up the most relevant ads for every search, taking into account location, language, timing and the specific query made. The announcement illustrates this as follows:

Nancy's Dairy advertises on the keyword 'milk.' Nancy's ads perform better on the keyword 'milk' in the U.S. than in Canada. Her ads also perform better on the query 'milk delivery' than on 'milk,' and better on certain search network sites than on others. Instead of one static Quality Score and minimum bid that determines whether the keyword 'milk' is eligible to trigger an ad for all search queries, we will now determine eligibility dynamically, based on factors such as location, the specific query, and other relevance factors. For that reason, Nancy's keyword 'milk' will be able to trigger an ad for search queries where it's likely to perform better, ie, in the U.S., on 'milk delivery' and on certain search network sites.

As a result of this the minimum bid metric will disappear and give way to 'first page bid', which is a more useful measure indicating how much it will cost for an ad to appear on the first page of results for a particular search term. And, because there are no longer minimum bids for keywords, you'll no longer see them marked 'inactive for search' — but the Goog warns:

Keep in mind, however, that keywords previously marked 'inactive for search' are not likely to accrue a great deal of traffic following this change. This is because their combined per-query Quality Score and bid probably isn't high enough to gain competitive placement.

by Sarah Clark (Web Editor)