AdWords’ New Quality Score: Trademark Problems
Man, this Google stuff is getting out of control. Kris blogged earlier this week about the problems that just about everyone seemed to be having with their Minimum Bids following the Quality update on Friday. Supposedly that has been corrected although I did hear some murmurs around the office today that led me to believe there were still some issues. I didn’t follow up on it; I have bigger and far more frustrating issues to deal with.
Michael Gray wrote a great piece today entitled Poor Poor Michael Gray in which he illustrated that Google had given his own name a “Poor” Quality score. He then added other, more unique names to his keyword list and found that they received “Great” scores and a lower Minimum Bid. It’s a great article and I recommend everyone check it out.
I could relate to Michael because I’ve been having similar problems. While I have no need to target my own name in Google, I do have clients with Trademarks. As everyone with any PPC experience knows, one of the first, and most important, campaigns you create is your Trademark campaign. Well, everyone besides Google that is.
This week I found myself slapped with a minimum bid of $5.00 for a term that a client not only owned the Trademark for, but it was also the name of the product that was plastered all over the landing page. How can that be a “Poor” keyword? And what could I do about it? I have to bid on the name of the product I’m advertising, I have no choice in that matter.
I haven’t spoken to a Google representative about this issue yet but I’m hoping there’s something that can be done in special circumstances where the Quality score backfires. If anyone else out there is having similar issues I’d love to hear about them and if you’ve been able to have it corrected. Right now I’m just going to have to pay what Google tells me to pay and hope the conversions make up for the ridiculous cost of advertising a product by its name.
[Note: I also just noticed that Yahoo disapproved a common abbreviation for the same product stating, “Insufficient content on the landing page.” Argh!!!]
February 22nd, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Christian – welcome aboard the blog – we’ll have to get your pic or mysterious avatar added for your next post.
For those of you who don’t know Christian he is one of Pepperjam’s senior search-engine marketing managers – he is an expert (aka, zen master) in both PPC and SEO.
Excellent post Chris!
I’ll tell you what – my “Price Gouging” post is making more and more sense. The truth is that when Google changes their organic search algorithm people can complain until they are blue in the face, but they don’t have money on the line like they do on the paid search side.
In the case of organic search Google has always played Big Brother and the community has sort of accepted Google as the final decision maker.
However, Google is playing with fire my trying to apply a similar formula to paid search – the truth is that market forces should be the primary if not sole determinant of position, not Google’s blackbox algorithm. If Google continues to apply arbitrary and unfair paid search algorithms there is going to be a serious fallout and this time being on the cover of Business Week won’t be something they want.
If Google doesn’t back off they are going to be dealing with an issue much larger than click fraud.
February 28th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
[...] Second, it’s been confirmed that I’ll be speaking on two panels at Search-Engine Strategies (SES) – New York, including (1) Search Arbitrage and (2) Affiliate Marketing Issues. I’ve spoken on these panels in previous SES’s and the Search Arbitrage one is especially hot. I can tell you now that Ive received some inside info that a senior person from Google will be on the arbitrage panel to defend Google’s arbitrage position. Remember, I’ve blogged about this before HERE and HERE – in short, Google has made a # of policy decisions regarding Google Adwords that has attepted to rid the system of Garbitragers (MFAer’s), but in the process have created a system that is rampant with false positives…most notably the fact that many affiliate marketers are forced to pay as much as $10 per click for a keyword that others pay 10 cents. Come to think of it, the Google Adwords product is resulting in quite a bit of collateral damage to advertisers these days – more on that HERE and HERE. More news on this soon. [...]