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Sunday, July 16, 2006

Don't Swallow That

It's pretty funny that Adam Lasnik of Google seems to have sent some acetaminophen to a poor soul suffering from Adwords Quality Score woes.

As Googler Nick Fox explained to me last week, a recent upgrade to the QS algorithm has now gone live (a bit too complicated to go into detail here given this month's "light posting schedule," but I'll discuss it with Page Zero Advisor subscribers in a podcast to be released late this week).

The basic principles are all public, of course, whereas the details aren't disclosed. What makes me scratch my head is all the theories that are flying around about the change. I can't blame people, because even though we know a fair bit about what Google discloses about QS, it's pretty complicated.

The biggest debates out there are about how much Google is assessing landing pages in determining your quality score for ad ranking purposes. I tend to believe that side of it is exaggerated. As Nick Fox suggested, there are rarely any gray areas, implying that it's generally seriously misleading ad campaigns and scam offers that are being targeted. Yes, there are landing page factors now in the mix.

But these will generally not affect accounts of long standing which have good CTR's established. You need to continue optimizing your landing pages for corporate goals and profitability, conversion rates, ROI, etc... not based on what you think it will do to your minimum bid in AdWords.

Yes, there will be some cases where suddenly your minimum bid has crept up, and you're convinced it's caught in the new landing page criteria. In that case, Google might be willing to take a manual second look.

As for acetaminophen, I don't usually point to my personal blog as I don't post anything of value there, but as I posted recently... that stuff is toxic! Stay away!

Posted by Andrew Goodman




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