Credit Crunch, Recession, Increasing Adwords Competition & the new Google Adwords Quality Score

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All the recent bad news and forecasts of recession, whether exaggerated or prescient, is having the effect of driving more business to Adwords. Vanity marketing on broadcast media and glossy supplements is cut while spending on marketing where you can measure the cost per acquisition has increased.

The number of competitors has been growing. Today there are 226 potential text Ads for the term “cnc milling” five times as many as a couple of years ago! There are many of these that are irrelevant or poorly written but even well constructed ads now need to bid over £1 to appear on the first page such is the desperate competition. (Campaigns that perform well can bring their bids down from these highs.)
Even in less competitive areas I have seen a remarkably consistent linear reduction of clicks for campaigns with a fixed budget. I have seen this 2008 trend in the graph, right, in over a dozen campaigns.

The way Google manages Keyword quality scores has also changed. You will no longer see “Keyword disabled” as the quality score is calculated dynamically. With an ‘OK’ or ‘Poor’ QS rating the keywords will just be shown less often and at less competitive times.
If you hover over the Magnifying Glass icon by your keywords, see example left, you can now see your Quality Score as a mark out of 10.

The lessons are that Adwords advertisers need to constantly monitor their campaigns and constantly test and improve. They need to improve their conversions, not just their traffic, to build their business not just Google’s.

Robert McGonigle : 31 Oct 2008 12:00 |  Tags: Adwords Qs Adwords Quality Score Credit Crunch Downturn Google Adwords Quality Score Recession |  Comments (1) |  Report a problem