Is Google Quality Score Taking Away Strategic Bidding?

How each advertiser decide on how much they should bid on their keywords, or more precisely, which position would generate the most ROI?

The PPC advertisers on the first position generate more exposure which is helpful in creating the highest chance for converting. While, other advertisers believe that consumers will shop for the best price and visit all the listing from top to bottom. But, when they reach the last ad and realize that everyone sells the product at the same price and they buy the product from site i.e. currently on and save all the troubles. Advertisers who believe in the latter would try to rank on the bottom of the SERP.

Therefore, it can be said that every advertiser has their own bidding strategies. The “ranking-at-bottom” strategy work well as it cut the cost even lower. The advertiser can choose to state the price in the ad hoping that the customers are aware of the price before they decide to click on the ad. This has been proven successful for some of the advertisers. It’s quite obvious that the bottom-rank advertisers would have a lower click through rate (CTR).

According to the article “Is The Hype Over Google AdWords Quality Score Justified?” by Craig Danuloff, the keyword quality score is mainly affected by the keyword’s click through rate and the click through rate of other keywords in the ad group and account. With this quality score system, the bottom-ranking and price-in-ads strategy would result in low click through rate for the keywords, and when the quality score gets too low, the keywords would be deemed “ad rarely shows due to low quality score”.

In order to keep the ads running, advertisers now have to abandon their once working strategies and keep bidding higher or rewrite their ads to attract more clicks when they clearly realize they will be just flushing money down the drain. So who’s the really benefiting from this quality score system?