the PPC Book|PPC Blog | Querying for Dollars

Yesterday the Adwords blog detailed some improvements being made to the quality score algorithm. I found them to be very interesting.

1. More precise Quality Score calculation

The most telling comment:

Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the most significant component of Quality Score because it directly indicates which ads are most relevant to our searchers.

I disagree with this totally, but that’s beside the point. High CTR will make Google the most money, but does not mean the ad is ‘most relevant’.

Anyway, we’ve always been told that CTR was normalized for position, and apparently it wasn’t, really.

In the coming days, we’ll update the portion of the Quality Score algorithm that accounts for ad position

To me that means it was taken into account, but not all that strongly.

2. Higher quality ads above the search results

This is an interesting revelation - the concept of a ceiling - or threshold that would keep all the ads down.

To appear above the search results, ads must meet a certain quality threshold. In the past, if the ad with the highest Ad Rank did not meet the quality threshold, we may not have shown any ads above the search results.

Secondly…

With this update, we’ll allow an ad that meets the quality threshold to appear above the search results even if it has to jump over other ads to do so.

Good, so we don’t all get punished for poor ad quality by our competitors. I believe this new approach will benefit skilled PPC managers the most.

I like!

More thoughts from our PPC friends on this subject:

Ad Position, CTR & Quality Score - We’re Going to do What we Already Did

Google Updates AdWords Quality Score To Be “Fairer”