Fabulous Freeform Fridays are your opportunity to ask me to clarify something I’ve written about, write something on a topic you want to read about or just plain ask me some questions.

Today’s Fabulous Freeform Friday was suggested by Trishan Naidoo who asked

Can you please discuss the implications of Google’s new QS measures for advertisers. What are the pros and cons? What is the rationale behind it?

Here we go Trishan, I’ll start by assuming you’ve all read the AdWords blog post and I don’t need to tell you what they are (go and read the post, I’ll still be here when you come back) so I’ll dive right into what I think will happen.

 

8/10
The first thing you’ll notice (I did anyway) was that their rating of your quality score is no longer (so) qualitative. They now give us a rating out of 10. I was disappointed by the first keyword I looked at (6/10 WTF?) but I quickly identified a group of keywords that weren’t scoring so highly and removed them from the adgroup. It was almost too easy!

Quantifying this measure has a big implications for testing the variables (and weights of these variables) which make up the Quality Score. Brilliant say I.

 

Continuous live updating of the quality score, less frequent landing page quality
Less frequent updating of the landing page quality will lead to a greater (average) lead time before we can measure the impact of optimisation on the Quality Score, while other changes (bids, optimising campaign, keyword relevance) will have shorter lead times. I think it places greater responsibility on the account manager to create tighter clusters of more relevant keywords with better personalised ads and more negative keywords, but I always think that!

 

Displaying minimum first page bids
The first thing that will happen here is people will stop clogging forums, message boards and other request for help sites with questions about $0.05 minimum costs and no clicks/impressions and clog them instead with complaints about Google rising prices, it might even make it to poor quality media platforms pick up and run with the story.

The rest of us will instead look at this change as a tool to help make even tighter clusters. You want to be in 4th place and 18 keywords have a minimum first page bid of $4 the other 40 keywords have a minimum first page bid of $0.45? Sounds like 2 clusters to me! It’s simply another tool which lets us segment our data.

 

The Rationale!
AdWords makes between 90% and 99% of Google’s income, depending on who you ask. They absolutely must improve it in every way they can. I dispute the argument that it’s about charging more for our clicks, that way leads short term profits and long term failure. I think Google is genuinely attempting to improve their users experience by helping the best ads get more impressions (remember, that’s all that Google has any control over, how often users see our ads).

 

Putting it all together
I don’t think these changes will have that big of an impact to most campaigns and businesses, I don’t like the longer time between making a change to your landing page and seeing the impact. From an agency’s point of view it makes it harder to convince clients of the neccessity of (often expensive) changes to their websites, because it will take that short period longer to gather the data. For particularly active businesses it will prove harder to quantify impact of changes.

On the other hand, live updating of quality scores is a good thing ™. It makes impacts far more immediate for the optimisation we do, meaning we can be more confident in our data! Yay!

It sounds boring (and it is) but any change made that gives us greater confidence in saying a change in results is an impact of our optimisation is vitally important, for agencies, clients and DIY-ers. Our clients can be more confident in our data and can see the impact of our work, they’ll spend more money on our work because it works better for them! A benefit to all.

 

Fabulous Freeform Fridays are your opportunity to ask questions. Something you want to know, want to hear my opinions or even have a discussion started? It’s all in your hands, post a comment on this (or any other) post if you have something you want to talk about or you can email me.

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