Ever since Google first announced that it would implement quality score into its methodology for calculating bid prices for keywords, an air of mystery has surrounded the process and has left many participants in the search company’s AdSense network scratching their collective heads in frustration.
Google To Reveal Quality Scores
When Yahoo launched Panama earlier this month, the company made a concerted effort to give its advertising partners detailed insight into its quality score practices, which was a stark contrast to Google’s lack of transparency.
Many AdSense partners became upset that the bids for keywords were being adjusted without any indication of when, why, or how quality scores had been adjusted.
Recently, however, Google has taken steps to enlighten its partners about the quality score process. The most recent round of information has come in direct correspondence to AdSense users.
Shimon Sandler has posted a letter he received from Google outlining the coming updates in quality score. It reads as follows:
In our ongoing effort to improve the quality of ads that we serve to our users, we’re making improvements to the way that we evaluate the Quality Score to set minimum bids for keywords. First, we will be launching an optional Quality Score column to provide you with more transparency into the Quality Score for your keywords.
Second, we made improvements to the way that we evaluate the Quality Score for all keywords. This change will allow us to more accurately set minimum bids for keywords where the system does not have a significant amount of data.
Based on this change, you may notice that the minimum bids for some of your keywords increase, while others decrease. Please keep in mind that you should always bid the value of your keyword to you – if your keyword becomes inactive for search, considering optimizing or deleting that keyword before raising your bid.
This improves our ability to set more accurate minimum bids for keywords that are new to our system until we have enough information to set a minimum bid based on that keyword’s performance.
So now AdSense users will actually be able to track quality score values, which should allow them to make direct correlations into how the minimum bids for keywords are affected by the value.
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