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Secret To Get On The First Page Of Google

I noticed in the last couple of days that the minimum bids for AdWords were no longer showing. Instead, if you hover over the little arrow next to the magnifying glass near your keyword, you’ll see if your ad is showing and what is the quality score (from 0 to 10) for that keyword.

This reminds me of the old days when there used to be a green quality bar under each ad.

Here is the announcement from Google with my emphasis in bold:

“Static per-keyword Quality Scores have been replaced with a system that evaluates an ad’s quality each time it matches a search query.”

The new per-query evaluation of Quality Score affects your account in two main ways. First, keywords will no longer appear as ‘inactive for search.’ Now all keywords will have the chance to show ads on Google web search and the search network (unless you’ve paused or deleted them). Keep in mind that keywords that were previously inactive for search likely won’t accrue much traffic after this change. This is because their combined real-time Quality Score and bid probably isn’t high enough to gain competitive placement.

Another way this change impacts you is that minimum bids no longer appear in your account. Instead, we’ve replaced minimum bids with a new, more meaningful metric, which will appear on your Keyword Analysis page: first page bid estimates. This metric estimates the cost-per-click (CPC) bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of Google search results when the search query exactly matches your keyword. The estimates are based on the ad’s Quality Score and current advertiser competition on that keyword. Although not a guarantee for an impression, this new metric should give you greater insight when choosing bids for your keywords. Learn more about first page bid estimates.

I think they’re still ironing out kinks in the system. I saw for a couple of keywords that the first page estimates were $100!

What I like about the new system is that the numerical ranking gives more insight from the perspective of the advertiser. It’s more transparent that the old quality scores of Poor, OK, and Great. Now if you have a score of 5 for a keyword, you can measure your progress as you improve the score to a 6, 7 or higher. By the way, you’ll need a minimum score of 8 to get a “Great” QS.

Technorati Tags: Google AdWords, quality score

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