Matt Solar’s Search Blog

Aug. 21, 2008 at 9:00pm Eastern by Barry Schwartz

Google AdWords Now With Real Time Quality Score, First Page Bid & More

The Google AdWords blog announced three major changes happening to the AdWords marketplace. First, Google will now calculate the quality score of your keywords at the time of the search query. Second, Google has removed the “minimum bid” metric and replaced it with “first page bid.” Finally, Google will no longer mark search ads as “inactive for search.”

Google said they will be rolling out these changes to a “very small segment of advertisers within the next day or two.” Google will be watching how this impacts those advertisers and will then decide when to launch this on a broader scale. Let me explain what these changes means in greater detail.

(1) Google will no longer assign a keyword a “static” quality score, instead, Google wil calculate the quality score at the time the search is done. The quality score will take into account the searchers location, query phrase and other factors. If Google sees that for a specific advertiser, a searcher in one location, who searches for a longer tail version of the advertiser’s keyword is more relevant, then that ad will receive a higher quality score at the time of the search.

(2) Google is doing away with the popular “minimum bid,” replacing it with “first page bid.” Why? Well, Google is no longer marking ads as “inactive for search,” and thus there is no minimum bid for a search ad to be displayed. Google does explain that a past ad that had a high minimum bid or that was placed as “inactive for search,” would likely not perform well with the new quality score because of the nature of the ad. So by changing it from “minimum bid” to “first page bid,” Google is able to give advertiser’s “better guidance on how to achieve your advertising goals.”

(3) Inaction for search is no longer going to be used, meaning, search ads will never be inactive. All your ads have the ability and chance to show up for keywords, expect for the ads you have paused or deleted. Google adds that keywords previously marked as inactive, will likely not perform well, “because their combined per-query Quality Score and bid probably isn’t high enough to gain competitive placement.”

We’re actively looking to hire – particularly in SEM. Check out our profile on GlassDoor.com and you’ll notice we have a higher employee satisfaction than the ever-praised Google.

Ignoring financial perks, other perks include TA branded iPods for new employees, daily doses of Rock Band on Xbox or Tennis on the Wii, seriously competitive foos, big screen plasma’s for gaming, weekly happy hours, and free lunches 3x/week.

The job site can be found at www.TripAdvisor.com/Jobs

As always, feel free to contact me with questions or to send your resume to me direct.

Cheers,

Matt

This is my third SES conference and to be honest, Search Engine Strategies 2008 San Jose just isn’t cutting it. I was pretty impressed with last year, but this year…. Meh.

To begin with, there is certainly a larger amount of sponsored sessions. The focus has shifted towards agencies, rather than in house SEM’ers. There are less Google speakers, which is why we’re here. And arguably worst of all, there is no formal “Meet The Engineers” at the Google Dance.

The commercialization and watered-down approach has probably made this my last SES event. I’m hoping to attend Danny Sullivan’s SMX event in New York in October. I’m hoping that SMX will pick up where SES left off.

I’ll try to write a follow up post on some of the learning’s.

From TechCrunch -

For most people on the Web, if Google or Yahoo cannot find something, it doesn’t exist. That has been one of the biggest drawbacks to creating a Website or application that displays itself as a Flash (SWF) file. Search engines could see the file, but they could not see what was in it. Until now.

Adobe has come up with a way for the search engines to read SWF files and index all of the information they contain. That means any text or links in a Flash application can now be indexed. This is a huge step forward for Adobe and anyone who develops in Flash/Flex. Michele Turner, Adobe’s VP of marketing for its platform business, explains:

We are releasing technology to Google and Yahoo that enables them to crawl and index SWF files. They are now searchable. This will open up millions of Flash files to search.

Adobe has created a special Flash player for the search engines that acts like a virtual user going through each application. It actually goes through the runtime of each Flash application and translates it into something the search engines can understand. So all of those fancy interactive Flash Websites and other rich Internet applications that have been invisible to search engines, can now be seen by them.

This is a huge loss for Balmer. Whether or not he’ll admit it is another story…
Yahoo! Inks Ad Syndication Deal With Google

Here is a good article on account-level Quality Score, specifically discussing the costs of migrating to a new account (with some speculation):

Instant (Bad) Karma’s Gonna Get Ya: AdWords Account Quality At Startup

If you’ve inherited a “dog” account, it could be a long, long time (like maybe forever) before minimum bids on a poor account get down to sustainable levels. It’s as if Google starts out assuming you’re an idiot, but then you have to go and prove it by ringing up piles of untargeted clicks. Now they know you suck.

So if you inherit this puppy, the long struggle to right the ship may wear you down, and the client’s budget may be exhausted if you aren’t first.

But why should you have to suffer indefinitely?

Google reps may tell you in specific cases that even taking into account the time it takes to build up good signals for strong account-wide quality, it might still be better to dump the old account in favor of a fresh, new one.

I’ll repeat that takeaway to be clear. You may save yourself weeks or months of pain by huddling with an AdWords rep who can frankly advise you on whether you should keep an existing account (if its Quality Score history is mediocre to good) or whether you should delete it entirely and start a fresh one (if that overall Quality Score is truly stinky).

…Reminder: you need to adopt a staged buildout strategy for new accounts in AdWords these days. Start with broad and experimental types of targeting and you’ll be fighting the Quality Score gods. Build up a strong account history with a tightly targeted (smaller but more beautiful) campaign, and you should get the green light to ramp up sooner.

Either way, though, unless it’s a very conventional e-commerce account, it takes time to get Great Quality Scores. Established accounts that are already doing well work differently - initial quality on new keywords can come in “Great.” But on new accounts, it’s harder.

…In less mature markets, we continue to see the Quality Score bar set less strictly. But what is particularly pesky, especially in the US where keyword auctions are already clogged with willing participants, is how sensitive and smart the predictive keyword relevancy algorithm is.
…Again, to generalize is difficult, but in today’s environment, to the 1-3 month “testing budget” for new accounts, you can probably tack on $5,000 at the low end, and $50,000 at the high end - just to run your account normally, at increased bids to ensure greenlighting (establishing account-wide quality) sometime this decade, or before climate change boils us all stupid, whichever comes first.

…Let’s explore that math. Except if they get very lucky with an extremely conventional ecommerce account, many small firms will now see their “get up and on Google” cost increased maybe sixfold.

…For the big guys - they’re not seeing a 500% increase in ramp-up costs. It’s maybe more like 25% or 30%.