Quality Score Released and Publisher Quality Thoughts
For the first time since the introduction of the Quality Score in August of 2005, advertisers now have a glimpse into their Ad Group’s score. Advertisers learned last week that they could enable a Quality Score column as part of a recent update. Those who checked about a day after the announcement, did indeed see the ability to add an additional column on the keywords tab in Ad Groups that contained search bids. That they do not show for content bids suggests that Google has planned a similar update to their November 6, 2006 update. Expect the transparency in the Quality Score to roll out after Q1 2007, perhaps as early as the beginning of May.
Google did show a kink in the armor, though, when upon enabling the Quality Score column, their algorithm apparently kicked in early and raised bids on keywords that had Good and Great Quality Scores. In what some deem a rare move and yet another step towards transparency, Google apologized two days ago for the unexpected minimum bid increases that took place over the holiday weekend. Academically, it’s fascinating; the most common occurrence paralleled a situation where an advertiser was bidding $.10 as their maximum and receiving traffic only to have Google inexplicably set the minimum bid to $.25. Imagine though a scenario where this same advertiser pays $.10 for a keyword, but had a maximum bid that was $.30. In this case, they would end up paying $.25 for the same click that used to cost $.10.
Fortunately, the impact would appear minor as Google explained in this post that they fixed the problem shortly after it began. [Question for readers, how many experienced a problem, and has your traffic gone back to normal?] The real test begins now. Google announced yesterday that the algorithm changes referenced in their post last week have gone live. The goal makes sense – help high quality words get traffic and discourage, i.e. make too costly, low quality keywords. Advertisers should see the impact over the next three to four days, although it often seems to take place much sooner. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to tell if a keyword’s quality ranking changes. Some might have taken snapshots of their accounts for comparison purposes, but for most of us, it most likely means analyzing Ad Groups that lose traffic and digging in from there. The Quality Score will show for the particular keyword in question, but many of the levers to optimize occur on the Ad Group and site level, e.g. copy.
Quality Score has always focused on the advertiser. It has become Google’s secret weapon for weeding out the undesirables without directly discriminating against anyone. The case for quality has always made sense, especially when thinking about the value to Google for protecting what appears on its homepage. Unlike years ago, homepage traffic from Google.com no longer accounts for the majority of traffic. Google Ad Words traffic comes not just from sites like Ask.com and Aol.com but tens of thousands of small, medium, and even large publishers. What type of safeguards does Google put in place for publishers? We have heard much spoken about what advertisers must go through on Google’s behalf, but we haven’t heard much about the publisher side. Granted, I do not follow-it well, but the last update or restriction I heard about had to do with publishers no longer being able to put tiny thumbnails near their ads. That practice sounds innocuous until you realize that the pictures lined up with the ad listings, increased click through rates, and related not at all to the listing.
In my opinion, publisher Quality Score, i.e. what the advertiser equivalent would be, lags well behind the standards applied to advertisers. Look at the following screenshots.
Fig 1.1 Ads dominate the page, which is not necessarily a bad thing, except that they are placed in areas likely to generate accidental clicks. Look who is helping subsidize the site. It’s the affiliate marketers. Keep trying to get rid of them and you might end up with what we see in the next figure.
Fig 1.2. A screenshot from the same publisher, different product. Instead of affiliate ads, we have eBay and Yahoo Autos. Who really thinks that people coming here will purchase something on eBay, and unless the Yahoo ads speaks to the visitors parents, I couldn’t imagine a less inappropriate choice in autos. Additionally, I can’t imagine that Westin is getting a bang for the marketing dollar. Put this publisher on CPA and watch their earnings go from thousands per day to maybe $100.
Fig 1.3. Yahoo Ads do not escape the publisher quality issue. Unfortunately for Yahoo advertisers, relevancy really lacks in this placement.
Fig 1.4. Another example of a breakdown in the auction method. Google acts no different from a blind network here too, and it’s the individual advertisers that suffer as they effectively overbid. It’s like paying $2 CPM but having much of your ads run on $.05 CPM inventory.
On the whole, Google Ad Words and Ad Sense have been crucial to the Internet advertising economy. But, the time has come where the world’s number one should start offering visibility that has become commonplace to much of the rest of Internet advertising ecosystem. In other words, number one should start leading instead of making the rest of us follow.
