Comments on: Google AdWords Adds Quality Score Column & To Improved Quality Algorithm

By: Tony Comstock

Tony Comstock — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 12:23:22 +0000

How do you suppose these Adwords rate? http://www.comstockfilms.com/blog/tony/2007/02/15/google-fails-when-language-fails-part-three/

By: rustybrick

rustybrick — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 10:00:12 +0000

It depends on the quality score. You will see for yourself by the end of this week.

By: webprofessor

webprofessor — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 04:04:52 +0000

This will impact a fair number of advertisers and keywords, Nick Fox told me. Some advertisers will see their quality score increase and some will see it decrease. Some keywords will see a higher CPC and some will see lower CPC. Some keywords will become inactive and some will see inactive keywords become active.

Way to be specific… lol…

By: Dave N

Dave N — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 00:47:46 +0000

This is encouraging, but I suspect it won’t actually help advertisers. It seems like a move to placate advertiser complaints without actually helping them.

The real issue is that advertisers have no information about the perceived ‘quality’ of their landing pages.

A transparent approach would be to give the advertiser a ‘landing page score’, and then to give advertisers an equation to determine the rank: CTR * Bid * LPS = ranking value

CTR is clear and easy to understand. You can look at it over time. You can make a change to your ad and find out the next day if it was a good change or not.

You know your bids.

Landing Page scores are totally opaque, and this Quality Score doesn’t provide any additional information because it munges a whole bunch of factors together.

So, is there really any information here that we can use to improve landing pages? It doesn’t look like it yet, but I’m hopeful.