Google advertisers howl over 'sudden quality score drop' For the second time in a month, Google advertisers are complaining of a sudden drop in "quality scores" on the company's AdWords platform, and some say this is forcing them to pay more for the same ad placements. In an email to The Register, a Google spokesman said that at this point, the company "believes" that current …
Given that Quality score is based on how long Google users stay on destination sites and how likely they are to click on sites in the results, it might seem that Google Instant and/ or Instant Preview are messing things up; either through Instant Preview pulling realtime pages through and/or Google Instant serving up masses of irrelevant results as a consumer types in a search phrase.
Either way, the timing is... coincidental, at best.
And yet, strangely, the same bug is not affecting my ad revenue form my website -- ie, I'm not getting paid more per click, though the advertisers are being charged more. I'm sure Google are still working as hard to fix it as they would have done had the problem been reversed, though...
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Quality scores dropped from 7/10 to 3 or 4/10 in late october, even for keywords with a 10% clickthrough rate (yes, 10%). Regardless of what Google say, it IS affecting ad placement; ads that were regularly placed at #3 or 4 are now right at the bottom for the same bid.
For me, this effective doubling of prices makes Adwords pretty much 'not worth it'; I'm going to pause all campaigns for a while and see what the effect is on new business over the next few months, as well as reevaluating other methods of online advertising.
Google are well aware of their massive market share but it would do them good to remember that they're not a real monopoly... yet.
Google in "we bump up price of advertising shock", in other news "bears crap in the woods".
When are people going to realise that google has a virtual monopoly, on a platform that is completely closed and unregulated? You can't see how quality score is calculated, and google can change without advice or warning, you have no visibility of others bids, and you can be rated lower instantly.
This is google's business and a small change increasing the cpc by even 2% probably makes google millions. Don't expect them to play nicely and you will be fine.
It's the reason I don't like google, and don't really want to support any product they sell.
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