Google Adwords Advertisers Upset by Recent Updates

In a recent WebmasterWorld forum thread a group of Adwords advertisers discussed the recent update to the Quality Score system that has been rolling out over the last year. Quality Score is Google’s name for their system of judging the value of a particular advertiser’s ad and landing page in conjunction with the keyword they are bidding on. The theory is fairly simple. Advertisers that don’t offer a good experience for Google Search user’s will have to pay more to advertise there. If you want to bid on the keyword “soccer cleats” but your landing page only has baseball cleats on it then you are offering Google’s user a bad ad clicking experience, they didn’t get the information or product they were looking for. Or if when the user attempts to buy soccer cleats on your site they are taken to a merchant website to complete the purchase rather than on your site that is also considered a bad experience by Google. Afterall, the user could have gone directly to the merchant rather than taking extra time (and clicks) to get there.

While the theory is simple the interpretation and implementation has been anything but. Starting at the beginning of 2006 Adwords began culling it’s advertisers by implementing Quality Score. There was no advance warning to advertisers and Adwords representatives would not disclose why a site might have been marked as offering poor quality. Over time, through trial and error many of the issues relating to Quality Score have become clear and some advertisers were able to adapt to the new rules of advertising with Google while some were not. Roughly each 3-4 months since Quality Score began to be implemented there have been new forum threads (like the one cited at the beginning of this post) where advertisers discuss (rant) about how Google is hampering their ability to do business online. While painful the process has some lessons to teach if you stand back and look for them.