Google’s AdWords Improvements

A few weeks ago, Google announced that they would be implementing some changes to AdWords, namely how quality score is calculated and minimum bids being replaced with first page bids.  Yesterday, Google said on their  AdWords blog that these PPC changes will be rolled out to all AdWords users within in the coming days.  Previously, only a select group of advertisers were affected by these changes.

Quality Score has been a static measure of your keyword’s quality.  Now, with this new change, it’ll be calculated when the search term is typed.  It’s ‘real-time’ now.  Keywords previously marked in your account as inactive for search will become elegible to appear again.  Google points out that this might not cause those particular terms to see a lot of traffic, as their QS might be too low to gain “competitive placement.”

The other change affects how you bid on your keywords.  No longer will you have a minimum bid, but it is a first page bid.  This is the minimum CPC needed to place your ad on the first page.  Google feels it will be a more meaningful metric when combined with dynamic Quality Scores and will help you plan your bidding strategy and budgets better.

Not many people have seen the changes in their accounts yet, but everyone should see them pretty soon.  Let us know what you think of these changes and what impact they’re having on your PPC strategy. Do you think they’re really improvements?

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