Google plans to update its mechanism for ad quality scoring, known as smart pricing, on the fly or immediately upon each search.
Google announced on its its AdWords blog Thursday, that ad quality will be judged at the time a user searches . Google will begin testing changes with a small set of users “within the next day or two,” before deploying the changes for everyone.
“We are replacing our static per-keyword Quality Scores with a system that will evaluate an ad’s quality each time it matches a search query. This way, AdWords will use the most accurate, specific, and up-to-date performance information when determining whether an ad should be displayed,”
The real-time process also means that Google no longer will mark various keywords as unavailable to advertisers who previously had low ad quality scores for those keywords.
Google is changing its mechanism for describing how advertisers can expect results. Instead of presenting them with the minimum bid required for each keyword, Google will show what cost advertisers should expect for high placement.
“Your ads will be more likely to show when they’re relevant and less likely to show when they’re not. This means that Google users are apt to see better ads while you, as an advertiser, should receive leads which are more highly qualified.”
“We’re replacing minimum bids with a new, more meaningful metric: first-page bids. First-page bids are an estimate of the bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of search results on Google Web search,”
If history is any measure, bidded prices will increase for the advertisers and revenue will once again be cut to the publishers, increasing Google’s bottom line and reducing ours.
Actually, that’s not quite the case – the new changes that have been announced are for the *search* quality scores; i.e. what appears on Google’s own search pages. Smart-Pricing is used only for the Content Network, and those Partner sites that appear on the Search Network.
Netmeg
I don’t read it that way.
if you read the announcement from the beginning it seems to apply to landing pages:
In July 2005, AdWords introduced minimum bids for keywords based on Quality Score. This system allows us to show very high quality ads to Google users, while also giving advertisers control over their keywords. Since 2005, we’ve improved Quality Score in many ways, such as the inclusion of landing page quality and landing page load time as factors. Along the way, we’ve also received much helpful feedback from both users and advertisers.
Today, we’d like to let you know of further improvements we’ll introduce in the coming weeks — based, in part, on this feedback. First we’ll outline the key points, and then dive into the details:
* Quality Score will now be more accurate because it will be calculated at the time of each search query
* Keywords will no longer be marked ‘inactive for search’
* ‘First page bid’ will replace ‘minimum bid’ in your account
Right, but [b]smart-pricing[b] does not apply to landing pages or search ads.
If you refer to this page:
http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/text/18989.html
You will see the section at the bottom that talks about Smart Pricing for the Content Network. It also does apply to the Search Network (but only for partner sites, not for Google’s own search pages)
This new quality score reflects the quality of the advertiser’s keywords, ads, and landing pages.
Smart-Pricing reflects the quality of the publisher’s site (and traffic) for ads on the Content Network.
NetMeg
If Google start adjusting the quality of the traffic immediately and they are happy with the results it will spread across their network.
My opinion based on past actions
Ok, that may well be. But that’s speculation on the future, it’s not what happened yesterday, so I found your post to be a little misleading when the title caught my eye. What was announced does not have anything to do with Smart-Pricing at this time. My opinion is based on long experience as an AdSense publisher and AdWords GAP, and direct knowledge from my AdWords rep.
Netmeg
Point taken, but that is why the title has a question mark at the end of it instead of a period.
Google – the Money Making Machine
Well, one thing seems pretty certain…as the complexity of their ad system continues to grow, the likelyhood of the 5+ million of smaller US biz’ coming on board–who expect to actually be able to find/see the ads they’re paying for (as they do with YP, newspaper, etc ads)–grows slimmer and slimmer.
UPDATE
For another take on this announcement check out:
http://www.robweatherhead.co.uk/google-to-reverse-minimum-bid-and-introduce-dynamic-quality-score