This week Google announced it’s latest tweak to the quality score system, it seems the resulting bashing revenues took due to their over-zealousness with the previous tweaks has been thought about and the solution is that everything will now be allowed to run BUT if you want to be on the first page you’ll have to bid enough to to be there.

In effect for most advertisers the first page is the only page so in reality the change won’t make much difference if the required first page bid is around the same as the minimum bid was and they couldn’t afford that, the good news is that there will no longer be keywords marked “inactive for search - minimum bid x” they will now be marked “first page bid x” although their combined quality score is probably too low to get much traffic anyway so changes for many advertisers will probably be minimal but at least the metric of “first page bid” is a bit more helpful.

The first page bid amount is based on the exact match version of the keyword, the ad’s Quality Score, and current advertiser competition on that keyword so different accounts and even adgroups will have different first page bid requirements for the same keyword if they have different quality scores.

Google are also replacing the static keyword quality scores with a system that will evaluate an ad’s quality each time it matches a search query. As a result ads will be more likely to show when they are relevant and less likely to show when they’re not.

The changes should mean more inventory will be served, even if you don’t get onto page one you now have a chance of getting clicks where previously your inactive keywords would have not triggered an advert so I guess it’s good news for the low level bid guys, they should get lots of inactive keywords activated although they’ll be getting page two+ traffic, but then again the lower you go the higher conversion ratios are usually are so could be a positive step for many advertisers and Google too.

I’ve thought all along that their greed for dollars was costing them many millions in dimes and this goes some way to try and tap into unsold inventory, more ads will run now than did before.. well in theory .. so there should be more revenue for google and more sales potential for advertisers