Google is making changes
to its AdWords program intended to
provide advertisers with more control
over campaigns while potentially
improving relevance for users.
The position and frequency of ads are
displayed on Google has long been determined by a
combination of the amount bid by the advertiser and the
perceived relevance of the ad, as measured by clicks
from users. Ads that performed well were often boosted
in position, displayed above ads with higher bid prices
that were deemed less relevant by users.
And in the opposite case, ads that did
not perform well were penalized, changing "state" from
normal to normal, in trial, on hold, and disabled.
Additionally, accounts are slowed when they didn't meet
Google's performance requirements, meaning ads would
appear rarely for your keywords. To restore the display
of these ads, advertisers were required by Google to
make changes to improve the quality of the ad.
Google has now simplified this process,
making all ads either active or inactive. Relevance
guidelines continue to be applied, but it should be
easier for advertisers to manage their campaigns when
they need be concerned about only two potential states
for ads.
In tandem with this change, Google has
also introduced a "quality based" minimum bidding system
that overrides the automated predictive modeling Google
uses to determine the state of an ad. Previously, ads
not meeting adequate quality levels based on this
predictive modeling were penalized. Now, advertisers can
push the ad out to viewers anyway, as long as they meet
the minimum bid established by the system.
"Advertisers now will have control over
which keywords they want to run," said Salar Kamangar,
director of product management at Google.
What Google calls Ad Rank, or the
position of an ad on a search result page, will continue
to be based on the maximum cost-per-click (the amount
advertisers are willing to bid) and quality (now called
the Quality Score).
In practice, this means there no longer
is a generic minimum bid for a particular keyword.
Minimum bids are now determined by a Quality Score,
which is essentially a prediction of how relevant an ad
is for a specific keyword.
A Quality Score is determined by the
historical keyword performance among all advertisers, as
well as the performance of an ad from an individual
advertiser performance across a set of specific terms,
and the relevance of the "creative" or ad text. Kamangar
said there are also other factors in determining the
score which he declined to disclose.
Pegging minimum bids to a quality score
that considers all of these factors effectively
eliminates Google's previous de facto minimum bids. For
ads that receive a high quality score, Kamangar said the
minimum bid as little as a penny. Conversely, for ads
that receive a low quality prediction, the new minimum
bid could be higher than the previous minimum of five
cents.
Minimum bids can also change over time,
as the quality score is continuously updated. Ads that
perform well will see a decrease in minimum bids, while
poorly performing ads will see an increase in minimum
bids.
Kamangar said that Google expects that
the changes will benefit both advertisers and users.
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