Google judges ad quality in real-time

Google plans to update its mechanism for judging ad-quality scores - a critical measurement that influences whether advertisements are placed next to search results - so that judgements of ad quality are made immediately.

Google uses an auction system to determine which advertisers' ads are placed next to search results but the winners of the auction are determined not just by how much an advertiser is willing to pay. Google also effectively raises minimum bid requirements for ads that don't meet its quality criteria, such as a good click-through rate or, in a newer addition, the speed at which an advertiser's web page loads. However, changes are coming to this system.

With the updates, ad quality will be judged at the time a user searches, Google said on Thursday on its AdWords blog. Google will begin testing changes with a small set of users "within the next day or two", before deploying the changes for everyone.

Google said: "We are replacing our static per-keyword quality scores with a system that will evaluate an ad's quality each time it matches a search query. This way, AdWords will use the most accurate, specific and up-to-date performance information when determining whether an ad should be displayed." Previously, Google used a static measurement of quality in assessing whether to display an advertiser's ad for a particular keyword.

The real-time process also means that Google will no longer mark various keywords as unavailable to advertisers who previously had low ad-quality scores for those keywords, Google said.

The company is also changing its mechanism for describing how advertisers can expect results. Instead of presenting them with the minimum bid required for each keyword, Google will show what cost advertisers should expect for high placement.

Google said: "We're replacing minimum bids with a new, more meaningful metric: first-page bids. First-page bids are an estimate of the bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of search results on Google web search."

Original article: Google to make real-time judgment of ad quality from CNET News.com