Google has released a couple pieces of data over the last two days that are worth reviewing for those who use the Google Adwords product.

Google released a white paper to try to dispel some myths when it comes to the subject of quality score. As Ginny Marvin pointed out on Search Engine Land,

There has always been a healthy amount of debate over the importance of Quality Score as an indicator of Google AdWords success and the amount of focus that should be devoted to it.

Today, Google issued a whitepaper called “Settling the (Quality) Score” to help advertisers use Quality Score to guide optimizations. Will it settle the debate? Maybe not, in fact it may just spark more conversation, but if you’re involved in paid search at all, you’ll want to check it out.

Google describes Quality Score being like a “warning light in a car’s engine” as opposed to being a “detailed metric that should be the focus of account management.”

In other words, it’s a signal not a KPI. It’s a mash-up of expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience, but, as we know, the score we’re shown isn’t the actual score given at any moment during an auction. The score we see represents overall performance in the auctions.

You can view the white paper here

Today Google released a video on the AdWords auction and Ad Rank, this is the scoring system that places ads in the order they appear. The video shows that Google uses a second price auction. I think this was helpful for someone like myself who has spent a limited time running an adwords campaign. It can be confusing/frustrating when you don’t see your ad and not sure why.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjOHTFRaBWA

 

Ginny Marvin noted:

It’s no coincidence that two resources — the Quality Score paper and this video — are being released in short order. The company started an initiative, spearheaded by Matt Lawson, Google’s Director of Performance Ads Marketing, to provide more resources and best practice overviews with advertisers than it has in the past.