Get Off the Soap Box
Dec 21st 2006BRizzleGoogle PPC
As you travel the back waters of the internet for blogs and forums regarding pay per click, you will undoubtedly cross paths with a number of people who can’t get enough complaining about the Google Quality Score. In case you haven’t heard, Google now places a ‘quality score’ that relates your keywords, ads and landing pages. The idea is that a higher quality score will increase your average position, because your site is very relevant to what the user is looking for.
The people who complain about the quality score are the same people who still write checks and still think Zubas pants are cool. (Were they ever cool?) They cannot accept change. Believe me, I don’t like change either. Saying that you welcome change is really just saying that something you didn’t want to have happen, happened. But you don’t have to like change to embrace it. I am always prepared for change and move with it. As long as you are prepared and can adapt to whatever is changing, you will be just fine.
Decent advertisers should not embrace the quality score with anything other than open arms and excitement. For hard working advertisers who aim to provide the user with a relevant and positive experience, your time has come. You will now be rewarded for your efforts. As for the spammers who buy anything and everything to get random traffic to their adsense ads, may you become the doormat of the search engine industry upon which I wipe my feet.
And this doesn’t relate just to spammers like ebay either. Even consider a good advertiser who sells both Zubaz pants and sweat pants. If the search is for Zubaz, how hard is it to have an ad for Zubaz and send the user to a page about Zubaz? I mean, if you walked up to a clerk outside a food and liquor store and asked, “Where do you keep the Tangueray?” And her response was, “Inside somewhere, you’ll have to find it.” You would not be a happy camper, and you would leave the store.
Some advertisers can’t seem to get it thru their thick skulls that it doesn’t matter how much money you throw at Google every month. You’ve heard these people. They just can’t throw out their average daily spend fast enough. “I spend over 4 gabillion dollars each day on Google and now they want to charge more for some of my keywords?” Nice try sport, a real number might have been more effective. While Google will encourage ad buying and help advertisers in any way possible, they know one important fact. There is only one person they need to make happy, the user.
Smart people learned long ago that you can’t force internet users to use or do something they don’t want to. Google won the search engine war because they provided, and still provide, the best user experience.
So my advice? Get of the soap box. I can’t even hear you complaining anymore because my ears are stuffed with the money I have made capitalizing on the new quality score. There may be some kinks to the quality score but they will get worked out. Bottom line, the quality score is not bad and it is here to stay. Use it to your advantage. Work to make your keywords, ads and landing pages more relevant. That will only help you live the life in the blue in the long run anyway.
1 Comment »
Nathaniel Broughton on 21 Dec 2006 at 2:35 pm #
First off, http://www.toolegit.com is just parked right now, maybe we should buy that and host our blogs there. Those pants are awesome. I think with the Quality Score thing you have further driven in the point that this is a good thing and that it is only going to reward those not trying to game the system. The real reason people are upset is cause they are lazy and now have to go back and figure out a new way to “game” it. But, like Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park, “Nature finds a way”. There will always be ways to manipulate search, organic or paid.
Long live Hockey Night in America.