The Google Inside AdWords blog just announced some more changes to the Quality Score which are going to be quite interesting. The first is going to be an improvement on Transparency - in other words, giving advertisers more information about the inner workings. In this case they’ll be providing indications on Quality Score at the keyword level, indicating whether it’s: Great, OK, or Poor. The other change is also providing the minimum bid for each keyword.
Looking at what has happened in the past I think it’s going to have a big impact on many AdWords customers. Smaller accounts with just a couple of campaigns will need to restructure their Ad Groups and be even more granular in grouping keywords together. While the same is also true for bigger accounts, they will also need to watch those big costly keywords very carefully. Those expensive 1 or 2 word phrases could be getting a whole lot more expensive.
For certain niche advertisers, where their strategy is not to get the highest CTR, may also suffer and see minimum bids rise, although they may not be too badly affected since they’re typically not near the bottom of the bid range anyway.
Google recommends implementing the Quality Score column, which although is not available right now, could mean using the new “customize columns” feature in the Campaign/Ad Group management tabs. This will allow you to monitor any minimum bid changes.
I hesitantly welcome this change - I’m sure Google is hoping this will get rid of a lot of PPC ads going to YPN sites, I just hope they don’t affect the “real” companies’ accounts.
One thing I know for sure, I’ll be doing a lot of monitoring/adjusting/optimizing again in the next few weeks.
Andy Beal and Search Engine Land also wrote about this issue.
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