Kikabink News

Undoubtedly in response to numerous questions from concerned and confused Google Adwords advertisers, Google has posted an explanation of its Quality Score changes on its Adwords blog.

In short, here are Google’s responses to the main three issues on advertisers’ minds:

1. How will Quality Score be calculated?

Google will STILL consider (a) the historic performance of you account, evaluating the clickthrough rate (CTR) of all the ads and keywords in that account; and (b) your landing page quality. However, although Google will evaluate your overall Quality Score at the time of each search query, it will evaluate landing page quality less frequently.

2. What’s the impact of the removal of ‘Inactive for Search Status’?

Google believes that by making all keywords active it will better be able to evaluate keywords for any query where they may be relevant. The company has acknowledged that keywords previously marked as ‘inactive for search’ would otherwise never show ads on Google.com, even where they might have been a high quality match for certain queries. Now it’s giving such keywords a chance.

3. What’s the difference between ‘first page bid estimates’ and the old ‘minimum bids’?

Google says that for queries that don’t have much advertiser competition, the first page bid estimate should be relatively close to your existing minimum bid. However, queries with lots of advertiser competition may have much higher first page bid estimates. This is because you’ll probably need to bid above the old minimum bid to rank higher than the competition and show on the first page of paid search results.

Source: Trevor Claiborne, “Quality Score improvements to go live in coming days”, Inside Adwords, September 15, 2008

TubeMogul, which distributes web video to multiple sites and collects viewing data, has introduced the “TubeMogul Marketplace” - a service that aims to match advertisers with video producers.

The TubeMogul Marketplace allows advertisers to review demographic data collected by TubeMogul in order to find appropriate web video from among TubeMogul’s 200 or so web video producers. Advertisers can then contact video producers and negotiate appropriate licensing arrangements.

TubeMogul is offering the service as a value-add for its producers and doesn’t plan to make any money from any matches made or deals transacted.

Source: Michael Learmonth, “TubeMogul Launches Web Video ‘Marketplace’ For Advertisers”, Silicon Alley Insider, September 4, 2008

Introducing TwittAd - a service designed to match Twitter account holders with potential advertisers. In other words, it allows you to sell space on your Twitter profile page to advertisers.

TwittAd provides the layouts and advertisers, you provide details about how many followers you have, how much you wish to charge for ad space, and other such details. Depending on how appealing your offer is, advertisers will or will not place advertising on your page.

Just one problem. As Erick Schonfeld points out in TechCrunch, all those advertisers may soon find that the only person seeing their ads is… you. After all, most people follow others via their OWN Twitter account, rather than hang out on other people’s Twitter pages.

Source: Erick Schonfeld, “Ads For Twits On Twitter (TwittAd Launches)”, TechCrunch, September 2, 2008, TwittAd

Last Thursday, Google announced improvements to its Quality Score, which it introduced in July 2005 to vary minimum bids for keywords based on relevance.

Google is making three key changes to Quality Score:

1. Quality Score will now be calculated at the time of each search query. On that basis, Google will evaluate an ad’s quality each time it matches a search query. Consequently, Quality Score will vary according to such factors as where an ad displays (Google, search partner, content site) and where the searcher is located (country, state).

2. Keywords will no longer be marked ‘inactive for search’. Rather than be deemed inactive for search due to low relevance and/or searches, all keywords will be able to have ads shown on Google and the content network (unless you’ve paused or deleted them).

3. “First page bid” will replace the “minimum bid”. First page bids are an estimate of the bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of search results in Google, based on the ‘exact match’ version of the keyword, the ad’s Quality Score, and current advertiser competition on that keyword.

So what do these changes mean?

Well, as far as a more dynamic Quality Score goes, it probably just confirms the need to keep keywords relevant. The good news is that, theoretically, YOUR ideas over what is relevant can be borne out by the behavior of your target market, rather than be deemed by Google. Provided, of course, that you get it right.

The lifting of the ‘inactive for search’ restraint is, I think, good news. Again, provided that you know more about your market than Google’s algorithm.

As for the replacement of the “minimum bid” with the “first page bid”… this sounds suspiciously like an excuse to make Google Adwords advertisers pay more. Hopefully not, but we won’t know until Google rolls out these “improvements” over the next few weeks.

Source: Trevor Claiborne, “Quality Score Improvements”, August 21, 2005

A mobile phone made by HTC and powered by Google’s Android software is expected to launch in the United States by Christmas, possibly as early as October.

T-Mobile will be the first carrier to offer the high-end phone, which will match many of the capabilities of Apple’s iPhone, including providing Internet access and performing computer-like functions.

Just as the success of Apple’s iPhone has largely been due to enabling users to download any number of applications to their phones and individualizing their phone’s functions, phones using Google’s software will also offer similar functionality.

Google is making the Android operating system software available free to a group of companies, including cellphone carriers and manufacturers, who have agreed to provide devices which will enable users to choose which applications run on them.

Source: Laura M. Holson and Miguel Helft, “T-Mobile to Offer First Phone With Google Software”, The New York Times, August 14, 2008