Adwords Quality Score Updates For Holiday Season
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | November 10, 2006 | Share This
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Another Google Adwords Quality Score update has gone into effect, much to the annoyance of many advertisers. From the Inside AdWords blog announcement earlier this week,
“First, we’ll begin incorporating landing page quality into the Quality Score for your contextually-targeted ads, using the same evaluation process as we do for ads showing on Google.com and the search network. Advertisers who may be providing a poor experience on their site will notice that their traffic across the content network decreases as a result of this change. Second, we’re improving our algorithm for evaluating landing page quality and incorporating landing page content retrieved by the AdWords system.
By including the landing page as a part of the ‘quality’ of the ad, Google is trying to weed out junk sites that have no purpose other than to monetize AdSense. Landing pages that aren’t designed with the user experience in mind, therefore, are considered less relevant and of lower ‘quality’. Since the launch of Landing Page QS in December 2005, its effectiveness has been highly debated. While the QS update does help combat spam sites and click fraud, it also increases minimum bid prices for advertisers given low-quality landing page ratings. Some advertisers claim that the annoucement of a QS update is less for the effect of combatting click fraud (which isn’t so much of a problem anymore) as it is to raise bid prices across the board. Google Watch explains this argument,
“Today, with click fraud on the wane, Google is free to make another algorithm change. Publicly, they say that they’re making more landing page QS changes. In reality, this is a chimera. The idea that there is a landing page QS is what keeps click fraudsters from clicking. The changeup forces marketers to invest more in paid search and not rely on organic as much. And what Google is really free to do now — right before the holiday season — is increase how important the bid price is relevant to CTR and landing page QS (if QS even exists). When click fraud was rampant Google wasn’t free to increase the importance of bid price, since bid price and the incidence of fraud would rise at the same rate. But with click fraud on the wane because of the fear of landing page QS, SEOs who spend large amounts of money on keywords will see their ads gain top position on SERPs, almost regardless of the quality of their landing pages, and without a concomittant rise in fraud.”
Indeed, many advertisers confirm the bid price hike,
“500 relevant, targeted keywords going to relevant, targeted pages in the site. Hardly a shotgun approach. 5% CTR over several months. Bids were .04. Today, wake up and Google wants $1 - $5 per click.”
Another on Threadwatch, reports the same,
“Looking at my data, I can say these updates aren’t about “quality” at all. Instead they are about jacking up the prices and pricing out the riff raff.”
It appears that most advertisers aren’t so much miffed by the update itself as they are by the update’s timing. Because landing page design is an SEO issue, and not easily fixed before the close-approaching holiday season, advertisers will try to compensate for their perceived poor-quality landing pages by increasing their bids. Voila, bidding war, just in time for Christmas.
But hey, look on the bright side, what merchants lose to bidding wars in AdWords, they’ll be able to save in transaction fees when they use Google Checkout! And that’s what we call an e-cosystem.
Topics: SEM: Bid Management |