Improving the quality of Google's Quality Score

A few years back, Google unleashed an analytic feature known as Quality Score which worked together with AdWords campaigns. Remember that AdWords is a program that places your company advertisements alongside the organic search results on a SERP (search engine result page). What Quality Score does is rank your textual ad’s content with the keywords a browser enters in the Google search field. In simplest terms, the higher your Quality score, the more relevance you have to the search query, and the better placement your ad gets on the Google SERPs.

Quality Score has been revamped over the years, most recently to include a wider variety of analytics such as landing page quality and landing page load time.

Here’s a brief look at the updates set to go into motion over the next few days, as written by Claiborne in the blog post:

• “Quality Score will now... be calculated at the time of each search query”
• “Keywords will no longer be marked ‘inactive for search’”
• “‘First page bid’ will replace ‘minimum bid’ in your account”S

So what does all this mean? Let’s take it one bullet point at a time.

The new Quality Score algorithm will track and measure every advertisement whenever a new search query is entered. This will help boost accuracy and deliver the most current degrees of relevancy. Among other factors, this element of Quality Score is what gauges which ads should be displayed with each keyword SERP.

Claiborne describes how this is a useful, two-fold benefit: browsers, on the one hand, will likely be presented with more relevant ads depending on their search keywords, and advertisers, on the other hand, will likely receive click-throughs from more interested visitors.

The “new per-query evaluation of Quality Score” will now display ads on Google SERPs as well as in the search network, as Claiborne writes. Additionally, it will not mark keywords as “inactive for search”

Lastly, “minimum bids” will no longer be a factor displayed in an advertiser’s account; this is generally attributed to user feedback which indicated the metric was irrelevant . Instead, a new metric will be calculated- “first page bids.” What this feature will do is generate an “estimate of the bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of Google search results” which certainly is more relevant to advertisers as they tailor their campaigns.

Lastly, Claiborne stressed that (as with anything) results will vary from advertiser to advertiser (that is to say, not all advertisers can expect miraculous changes overnight with these new features.)

Google continues to develop its AdWords API and AdWords Editor, two complementary programs for the advertising system, so that they all sync together- but until further notice, API and Editor will display the minimum bid field and not the first page bids metric.

For now, the new Quality Score features are available only to pre-selected advertisers. Pending feedback, the features will be publicly launched in the coming weeks.

Google has long dominated the advertising industry, in large part due to the continuous updates and enhancements it makes to AdWords and AdSense based off consumer and advertiser feedback. These new features are just another example of the company’s determination to deliver optimal experiences for users.