Google advertisers howl over 'sudden quality score drop'

For the second time in a month, Google advertisers are complaining of a sudden drop in "quality scores" on the company's AdWords platform, and some say this is forcing them to pay more for the same ad placements. In an email to The Register, a Google spokesman said that at this point, the company "believes" that current …

[Dibbles]

Instant link?

Given that Quality score is based on how long Google users stay on destination sites and how likely they are to click on sites in the results, it might seem that Google Instant and/ or Instant Preview are messing things up; either through Instant Preview pulling realtime pages through and/or Google Instant serving up masses of irrelevant results as a consumer types in a search phrase.

Either way, the timing is... coincidental, at best.

[Anonymous Coward]

how could they possibly know

how long you stayed on a destination site, without serious tracking. Presumably noscript blocking everything google related would cause issues with it.

[Cheshire Cat]

Doesnt seem to work both ways, though

And yet, strangely, the same bug is not affecting my ad revenue form my website -- ie, I'm not getting paid more per click, though the advertisers are being charged more. I'm sure Google are still working as hard to fix it as they would have done had the problem been reversed, though...

[Anonymous Coward]

omg

Prices have gone up - holy crap, who would have thought it!!!!!111!!!1111

[Gordon Pryra]

I agree with the lack in increase from adsense.

Like the poster above pointed out, I'm not receiving any more from my adsene clicks.

I only made $598395495 while I slept instead of the hoped for $958934563.

[Anonymous Coward]

Happened to me too

Quality scores dropped from 7/10 to 3 or 4/10 in late october, even for keywords with a 10% clickthrough rate (yes, 10%). Regardless of what Google say, it IS affecting ad placement; ads that were regularly placed at #3 or 4 are now right at the bottom for the same bid.

For me, this effective doubling of prices makes Adwords pretty much 'not worth it'; I'm going to pause all campaigns for a while and see what the effect is on new business over the next few months, as well as reevaluating other methods of online advertising.

Google are well aware of their massive market share but it would do them good to remember that they're not a real monopoly... yet.

[Richard Jukes]

Yay

Yay, I got quoted in a Reg article :p

Im putting my money on it being a bug in a monthly batch process, it happend last month on the third weekend in the month, same this month. Of course the cynical among us could just assume that google are shafting us for more money because they can.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do no evil

Google in "we bump up price of advertising shock", in other news "bears crap in the woods".

When are people going to realise that google has a virtual monopoly, on a platform that is completely closed and unregulated? You can't see how quality score is calculated, and google can change without advice or warning, you have no visibility of others bids, and you can be rated lower instantly.

This is google's business and a small change increasing the cpc by even 2% probably makes google millions. Don't expect them to play nicely and you will be fine.

It's the reason I don't like google, and don't really want to support any product they sell.

[Code Monkey]

"a bug in the system that seemed to drive quality scores down in late October"

A bug that mysteriously drives up revenues in October? I can imagine how urgently they're looking at that!

[TeeCee]

Hmm, I see the problem.

User: "Loads of money on the table."

Google: "Hmm, we'd better tweak our 'scraping it over the edge and shovelling it into our pockets' algorithm again then."