What’s Wrong with the Google AdWords Quality Score?
A number of Google AdWords advertisers are shocked by their recent accounts. Many are entertaining cobwebs at the back of their mind due to the issues surrounding AdWords and their Quality score these days.
Dozens of reports pour in and people are detecting that Google Adwords' CPC prices soar like rockets. Along with the launch of AdWords quality score, a bug has been released to increase the bid price of well performing keywords and ads. This is done for no reason whatsoever.
According to reports, some of the users who have logged into their accounts noticed that for a particular keyword phrase that yields 5 percent CTR, they are told to pay a minimum bid of $10 per click. The thing is improving quality score or raising a bid to $1.00, $5.00 or $10.00. More and more reports are coming in with the same issue.
An email from Google has this to say:
Unfortunately, due to a technical issue, you may notice that the minimum bids for some of your keywords increased dramatically, despite them being high performing, good quality keywords. This is a temporary issue that our engineers are aware of and they are working to resolve it as soon as possible. I am sorry for any inconvenience.
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By Site Submit MD, February 17, 2007 @ 3:56 pm
This will make the results more relevant. this is a good thing.
By Susan CR, April 14, 2008 @ 2:31 pm
As I see it, there are two problems. The first is that AdWords’ quality score is literal. It makes no allowance for context. If a particular keyword isn’t literally on the page, you have to pay more. I have a political client who wants his ad to appear whenever his opponent’s name is searched, but does not want to mention his opponent’s name in the website. So he’s screwed at the rate $10/click because Google considers the opponent’s name unrelated.
The second problem is that AdWords does not behave like a traditional advertising medium. If I want to buy a quarter page ad in the newspaper, and they have some unused space, they don’t raise the price – they make me a deal. Similarly, if I’m a large oil company and I want to run an institutional TV spot about all the wonderful things I’m, doing for the environment, the TV station doesn’t say “this isn’t related to your product line, so you have to pay more”.