We all know Google hates affiliates, and there has been speculation that this new Ad placement algo shift was the latest in a long line of arrows slung at this group. I certainly don’t follow the mortgage niche everyday, but I do check every once in a while when I want to gauge what’s going on in the most competitive niches. So, I’d like to ask the mortgage affiliates who use PPC as a primary traffic tool - how are you feeling today?
The Top results for ‘mortgage refinance‘
Lending Tree (big dog)
Countrywide (woof woof)
eloan (large sized dog)
American Equity (local result, real business, not affiliate)
DiTech (large breed)
GMAC (great dane-like)
Lex Home Loan (local result, real business, not affiliate)
Bank of America (woof)
Best Lenders USA (holy cow, an affiliate!)
Quicken Loans (never heard of them 
)
Mortgage Rates Expert (2nd affiliate)
So, the affiliates aren’t even sniffing the top 5 results. Someone who follows this niche more closely than I could probably provide a more detailed analysis, but I do remember seeing more affiliate saturation in the PPC results before this change.
Agree?
Disagree?
If you’re just tuning in, last week the PPC world was all huffy about the proposed change by Adwords to factor in max cpc versus actual cpc when calculating ad rank.
As for my experience, I haven’t noticed an overt difference in CPA or campaign ROI. Although, here is an interesting trend in one of my larger campaigns over the last 7 days (the period we can assume this change has been implemented)…
My average position has dropped over 1 full slot:
While my cost has stayed relatively the same:
2 screenshots does not a case study make, but it warrants a little investigation on my part. The bottom line, my campaign performance has not changed, I’m still hitting my client’s target spend and CPA, so I’m not all that concerned.
Anyone else see a difference in campaign data or performance?
Filed Under (the PPC Book) by Jeff Hudson on 21-08-2007
Maybe we can call this: The Google Creep
Defined: The slow steady crawl of complete Google data ownership
We’ve recently introduced the ability to export your AdWords reports to Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
**Sigh
Okay, so it took a few re-reads before I got a handle on the new Adwords quality score update. Basically, what you need to understand:
The key change to the formula will be how we consider price.
Instead of factoring quality score and actual CPC, they are going to factor quality score and maximum CPC.
The Adwords team tries to convince you that this gives you more control over your placement:
Actual CPC is determined, in part, by the bidding behavior of the advertisers below you. This means that your ad’s chance of being promoted to a top spot could be constrained by a factor you cannot influence. By considering your ad’s maximum CPC, a value you set, you will have more control over achieving top ad placement.
Whatever, that’s fine. I understand Google wants to make more money, I have no problem with that. Just don’t tell me you’re trying to increase the ‘quality’ of your ads.
This change is designed to improve the quality of our ad results…
I’m speculating here, but do you think that turning the dial all the way to ‘quality’ last year started to make ‘too much’ of an impact? Now the dial is going to be somewhere between ‘we like high bids’ and ‘we’re rich as hell’. Maybe, just maybe, the quality score was partly responsible for the drop in net profit margin from 29% last year to 23%?
