Google Adwords Changes 3
Adwords RIP
- The Minimum Bid And The Qualtiy Score

( Continued from Page 2: The Perfect Adwords Ad ) ...

In general, what Adwords is really all about is simply serving text ads in response to keyword searches a user enters when performing a search using the Google search engine.

To monetize the process, Google is billing this system as an auction for Adwords advertisers. This means, if you want to show your own text advertisements on Google search engine result pages, you can set up a text based advertisement, and bid for a particular keyword or groups of keywords to have it being displayed whenever someone searches for the term(s) you have chosen. If your maximum bid was high enough, chances are, that your ad will be shown.

As told, the Adwords system is auction based and the winning bidder will get the top spot on the page, the second high bidder, the second spot and so on. And best is, you only pay for results. That means that only if your ad actually will get a click, you will have to pay Google the money for it.

This had been a great working system so far, but since the invention of Adwords things have changed.

Basically, the principle of ad bidding had never changed, but Google implemented changes and improvements into their Adwords system, that do not always help to make the hole process more simple or transparent.

Bidding on Adwords cannot really be compared to bidding on auction platforms like eBay for example. Before you can start bidding, Google will verify your ad, your website, your campaign history and more in order to give you a so called "Quality Score".

The basic idea behind this "Quality Score" system had been to improve both, the quality and the relevancy of the ads shown upon a particular keyword or search term. There is nothing to say against this, as it had been intended in order to improve search engine users experience upon using Google as a search engine.

However, many say that Google had been getting too tough with their rules and scoring algorithsm recently, leaving many low budget advertisers out in the rain.

In some cases, using its new and partially secret Adwords Quality Score rating, Google will prevent you from bidding at all. Period.

In other cases it will "serve" you with a minimum bid, that will be so high that Google will know that you must be totally insane if you would start bidding at this price. And this exactly had been their intention. Preventing you from bidding. And even if you would bid at this minimum click price, your ad would still be listed far below those of your competitors, even if they would bid far less for a click onto their ads than you do.

The reason behind the madness is, that Adwords will calculate your final ad spot and ad ranking by multiplying your bid and your quality score. But when reading a little in Google's official Adwords blog, one can find statements that they may soon revamp their Quality Score system.

>> Page 4: Adwords Quality Score Changes