The NY Times has a profile of several individuals behind the scenes at Google trying to monitor and safeguard the company’s financial performance and fine tune accordingly. The piece focuses on Nicholas Fox, who’s a key member of the “ads quality” team, and Hal Varian, chief economist at Google.
As expected, Google has announced that landing page load time will become a quality score factor in Google AdWords starting mid-June. In preparation for that launch, Google has started showing advertisers their metrics for the landing page load time for each keyword’s landing page. Here is a picture of what an okay landing page load […]
This morning I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that several webmasters began noticing three values being displayed under some AdWords ads that might reveal some details on how Google may rank AdWords ads. The scores include the “Pscore,” “mCPC,” and “thresh.” Danny and I took guesses at what each might mean and the mCPC […]
In The Trenches is a weekly spotlight of tips, tricks, and news about the tools search engine marketing professionals use to give them a leg up on the competition. Today: News from the search engines, today’s in-depth look, “What You Don’t Know About Quality Scores May Kill You,” and this week’s free tips and tools.
Our newest Search Engine Land column, In The Trenches, launches today. In The Trenches is a weekly spotlight of tips, tricks, and news about the tools search engine marketing professionals use to give them a leg up on the competition. In today’s debut article, Josh Dreller comments on news from the search engines, offers an […]
B2B search advertisers must confront an annoying paradox. For most advertisers the billable event is the click. Yet for most B2B advertisers success depends not on clicks, but rather on conversions: the percentage of visitors who take the desired online action, such as downloading a white paper or registering for a webinar. B2B marketers must […]
Google has confirmed that they will be adding page load time as a quality score metric in the near future. The feature will go live in the “next few weeks,” but it won’t impact your quality score right away. A month after the metric goes live, Google will then implement the grade into the overall […]
A WebmasterWorld thread tipped both Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Roundtable (that’s me) off on the fact that Google has added an additional quality score factor to the AdWords ranking algorithm. The new factor is page load time. If your destination URL is a very slow loading page, then Google will give you a […]
Perhaps it was lucky fate that Anders Hjorth (of Relevant Traffic, a European SEM agency) and I didn’t have too much time to compare notes going into the panel “Tuning Ads for Quality Score” at SMX Stockholm last week. Fortunately, the presentations didn’t overlap too much. The interesting thing is the overlapping conclusions we drew […]
Google bullish on advertising system from the Financial Times reports that Google has made 20 or so improvements to their search ad system in the last quarter. Nick Fox, director of product management in the advertising division, said that in the third quarter of 2006, Google only made 2 or 3 improvements to the AdWords […]
Google announced a new keyword analysis page that offers more insight into why Google scored your keywords with a certain quality score. Now, if you have a poor quality score, Google may share a reason. The reason can be found by viewing your keywords tab, then clicking on the magnifying glass icon beside any keyword, […]
The nice folks from Google were in for a visit a week or so ago. One of the topics on the day’s agenda was Ad Quality. If you read extremely closely, much of what they presented in their briefing is also described at the AdWords help center (see What is a ‘Quality Score’ and how […]
The Inside AdWords blog has provided more detail into what makes for a low landing page quality score. Google also said they will now not pre-announce all quality score algorithm changes prior to implementation. In fact, Google details which types of sites can cause all your landing pages to be penalized. The new FAQ describes […]
In the upcoming weeks, Google will be releasing an updated algorithm to determine the ads that are displayed in the top ad spot, above the organic search results. The updated algorithm will continue to use the quality and cost-per-click (CPC) figure but will be slightly tweaked for that top ad position. Instead of using the […]
The Inside AdWords blog announced the official release of a new metric you can find in your AdWords reports. The new metric is impression share, which we actually reported back in April. The new metrics include: Impression Share (IS): The percentage of times your ads were shown out of the total available impressions in the […]
Google has informed me they have made a change to how they measure landing page quality, which will impact the overall quality score of your ads. I was told that this was a minor update and should not impact the “vast majority of advertisers.” However, some advertisers will see an increase in their minimum bids […]
To grow share, revenue and market capitalization, Google should adopt Extreme Transparency. Google dominates search with 70% market share. Google has soaring revenue, 63% up year-over-year Q1. Google has a monster market cap, north of $140B. But there’s a problem lurking in the wings, and pulling that problem into the sunlight and solving it—nay, obliterating […]
Google AdWords has begun to roll out the quality score column in advertiser accounts in AdWords last week. Now, Google has announced that the new quality score algorithm has been pushed to the Google servers. In the next few days, these changes will be complete and sponsored ads in the Google results will change – […]
After several emails from readers and spotting Jeremy Mayes post I have learned of a bug with Google’s new AdWords quality score algorithm. Google AdWords Adds Quality Score Column & To Improved Quality Algorithm from Wednesday warned us of the new changes coming but apparently there is a bug that makes good performing ads prices […]
Google will be adding a quality score column within your AdWords accounts by weeks end. In addition, within the next couple of weeks, Google will be rolling out a significant change to the AdWords quality score algorithm. I had a conversation with Nick Fox, the head of Google’s ad quality team, to review some of […]
Huge news last night was that Yahoo announced that they will be launching their new ranking algorithm for their sponsored search ads on February 5th. The new ranking model is a huge change from the old model, which was based on a pure auction bidding environment. Now advertisers are going to have to worry about […]
This morning I posted a screen shot of the quality score in AdWords, showing a rating of Great, OK and Poor. The quality score does not show all that much, but it does show more than before. Plus, Google has set up some more documentation on what the quality score column means. The help page […]
Google has been listening, I guess, to advertisers recent complaints over the new AdWords Quality Score and Landing Page update. The Google AdWords blog informed us that Google has added several pages of content to the help section better documenting the changes. Those pages include, and I quote: