On the plus side, it is a convenient to see the min. bids for active keywords, but I had been using that functionality within adwords editor for a while, so I am not sure that this functionality is new.
On the con side, telling me that a $10 min. keyword is "poor" in Google's eyes is hardly more transparent. Telling me one with a 3 cent bid is "great" is also not much help. I had pretty much figured out that much out by myself.
While I appreciate that google is concerned that too much transparency could result in "gaming" of the system, I have some concrete suggestions on how to make better use of the new QS Column:
Rather than keep advertisers guessing by telling us "poor" "ok" or "great" give "reasons" such as suggested below:
A: Keyword/Text/Landing Page is OK
B: keyword is irrelevent to ad text
C: keyword is irrelevent to landing page
D: ad is irrelevent to landing page
E: ad text is poor quaility
F: landing page is poor quality
G: entire domain is poor quality
H: other
Multiple problems could return results such as C,E
While I can see how giving specific landing page/domain criticisms might allow advertisers to "game" the system, I dont see how these suggestions would allow advertisers any unfair advantages.
Maybe I am missing something, are other advertisers finding the new Poor/OK/Great system helpful in some way?
What do others think?
I can assure you that the Quality Column as launched yesterday is intended to be the first step of many. ;)
AWA
AdwordsAdvisor, can you confirm that there is a glitch at adwords affecting a large number of advertisers. I just got off the phone with a rep that was not surprised by my $10 minimum bids on well performing words. He said it was a problem that was elevated to their technical staff to fix. It was not related to QS according to this person.
Yes, I can confirm that there was a technical issue, although I am not aware of the number of advertisers affected at this point. For more comments on the same topic, a very active thread on the subject (including several posts by me) may be found here:
[webmasterworld.com...]
AWA
