Google Adwords making Quality Score improvements

According to a post yesterday in Inside Adwords, Google’s official blog about Adwords, “changes will take effect in all advertisers’ accounts over the next few days.”

They list three main improvements to Quality Score:

  • Quality Score is now more accurate — because it is calculated at the time of each search query
  • Keywords are no longer marked ‘inactive for search’ — all keywords are active because they are evaluated for every relevant query
  • ‘First page bid estimates’ replace ‘minimum bids’ in your account — providing a more actionable and useful metric to advertisers

You may read a detailed explanation by reading their “Google Adwords making Quality Score improvements to go live in coming days” post.

My first thoughts are:

I’ll remain from Missouri on their first listed change. We’ll see.

The ‘inactive for search’ change will help most people, but especially advertisers with smaller budgets that have unique products and search terms. While the search volume may be low on some terms, the return is not necessarily so.

Replacing ‘minimum bids’ with ‘First page bid estimates’ more clearly reflects the metric, and is an improvement. Though, as most often the case, Google is encouraging higher bids with this. That is not necessarily bad, just shouldn’t be constued as an altruistic change.

Bottom-line is that almost everyone can benefit from a Google Adwords campaign, and this makes Adwords a little better.