MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

Reading Greywolf’s recent post about quality score within Google’s adwords positioning really highlighted a rant I’ve been having internally for a little while.

In a world where every publisher has to be ABC certified so that they are completely accountable to advertisers, Adwords continues to disregard their advertisers. Graywolf has a great point about quality score: just pay us more money.

Even though Google does report the most basic of quality scores, they have a ludicrous scale to report them. If they truly wanted to be upfront, surely they could have a scale of 20, as minute changes to the quality score will determine ad placement.

When you establish the quality score, you should also be able to see exact placement of your ads according to your click budget, not a fuzzy approximate. Vagueness does result in overbidding.

While I don’t support any whiners when it comes to listing in Google naturally (adhere to guidelines and do the hard yards), they surely have to have more accountability to their advertisers.

How sure are we that they are even playing by their own rules? With that much volume, any rounding errors in their favour could earn them a lot of money. Having such vague positioning rules undermines their respect for their advertisers.

The question is how long will the advertisers take it? IMHO until the next best thing comes along, then they will jump, quickly.