Google AdWords™ Announcement: Improved Ad Relevancy

[OptimizeOnline]

I've just been notified of this change from Google. There was no link to this announcement on their web site so here's a copy of what they said.

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Google AdWords™ Announcement: Improved Ad Relevancy

Hello from the Google AdWords Team:

In the next few days, we will introduce the first in a series of ad quality improvements designed to provide the most relevant, targeted ads possible. By focusing on ad relevancy, we will help our users find the products and services they are looking for, encouraging them to return to your AdWords ads again and again.

What is changing

Our ad quality improvements will help us be more precise in identifying the most relevant ads for a particular query, which may mean more clicks for some ads and fewer clicks for others.

For example, an advertiser specialising in Alaskan cruises may have selected cruises (broad-matched) for their campaign. Previously, this keyword may have been disabled due to poor performance on more popular queries such as Hawaiian cruises. Instead of disabling all broad match variations of cruises, we will now show this ad for specific query variations that are more relevant to the ad, such as Alaskan cruises.

How this will affect you

Over the next few days, you may start to see a change in your website traffic and ad performance metrics, such as your clickthrough rate (CTR), cost-per-click, or ad ranking. While these changes will initially only affect broad-matched keywords, future improvements will include other keyword matching options. Please see our demo for more information on keyword matching options.

Review the FAQ for more detailed information on how these improvements may affect you.

What you should do

To ensure that your ads continue to perform as best they can, we recommend that you monitor your performance metrics and optimise your account as necessary. Visit our Optimisation Tips page to learn more.

We will continue to make ad quality enhancements to help improve the performance of your ads and the search user experience over time. We believe these improvements will allow you to reach more potential customers and bring them back to your AdWords ads.

We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising available.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team

[seobook]

cool stuff.

[doppelganger]

Found the link:

https://adwords.google.com/select/news/sa_jun04.html

Here's a link to the FAQ dealing with ad relevancy:

https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=131

[AussieWebmaster]

I guess you got it at work... I just got in a while ago and had two copies in the inbox.
The English connection will make sure we get things posted before people even wake up over here.

[andrewgoodman]

It appears the new treatment of broad matches might be aimed at countering the "swamping effect" that causes perfectly good ads to be disabled when popular phrases come in and out of vogue and lower the overall CTR even though the advertiser is usually on a relevant track and is making good money from the ad.

I've been arguing for some time that this needs to be treated with greater sensitivity and am tentatively elated with the change. :cool:

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

> Improved Ad Relevancy

I just hope the "impovement" turn out to be an improvement for us - not just Google :)

[andrewgoodman]

I'm speculating that it's a way to relax relevancy rules slightly while not being seen as doing so. Thus it could be a help to advertisers while not really impacting users that much -- something I've been advocating for some time. It's just too easy for solid advertisers to have keywords disabled and Google needed to look harder at new algorithms that could smooth the edges a bit.

Time will tell - for many of us it's difficult to know if this will result in increased click volume as we are entering a slow summer period.

Overall though, the benefit of a high CTR (all else being equal) cannot be overstated. Try bidding against some guy who has 8% on a phrase where you have 1%. He can bid 25 cents and you'd need to bid $2.01 to outrank him. Good luck. :D

One concern might be that any new change that adds click volume can be inflationary and to the detriment of advertisers (certainly more clicks equals more revenues for Google). However, this has always been a concern with broad matches and the solution can simply be to adjust one's bid or not use broad match at all.

As long as those clicks are coming from my carefully crafted ads from users using Google Search, they're usually high quality. There are several "bad" inflationary moves we've seen by Google and Overture in the past couple of years, but this doesn't seem to be one.