Google Says No Buying Top Ad Spot

May 30, 2008

Large, medium, and small business owners along with the rest of us, all compete for the top ad spot on Google. In the coming weeks ad quality will become more and more of an issue, as Google plans to rank advertisers ad quality by landing page load time and speedier page loads. Meaning those who plug-in a lot of 3rd party content on their site will receive lower scores then the rest of us.

Google strives for perfection, they want to give the person searching the best possible results. It is no longer “enough” to just provide relevant results, they must also now provide the most relevant results and first display the best of those relevant results - Ad quality is a must.

Better positioning of ads (or should I say fewer ads) in the organic results makes the ads seem much more valuable. Google’s strategy lately has been to shift from the quantity of ads to the quality of them, meaning the company believes that one flawless ad brings in more money then several poor ads.

The issue first spawned from Google’s Testing Blog. Alex Icev touched on the process it takes to rank the quality of the search results, and how the change was put to work on the advertising aspect of things.

“We needed to change a system that was predominately driven by human influence into one that (built) its merit based on feedback from the community,” Icev stated.

Here he gets into detail’s of how the process works, focusing more on moving poorer performing ads out of eye’s view.

The idea was that we would penalize the ranking of paid ads in several circumstances: few users were clicking on a particular ads, an ad’s landing page was not relevant, or if users don’t like an ad’s content. We want to provide our users with absolutely the most relevant ads for their click.

It seems the change to scoring ads relying on things like speedy landing page loads has effected a lot of people. However the bigger budget advertisers won’t have much trouble with this, they will immediately perfect their all around ad quality to suit them for the competitive keywords.

All and all, Google’s point in all of this is that the person searching clicking on ads, gets the best possible site for whatever search term was typed in the search box.

For those of you who use paid advertising you might want to look into improving ad quality, simply because the higher your ads quality, the less you will pay per click, and the higher your ad will rank amongst the rest.

To find some useful tips on making a great landing page check out - 15 Tips to The Perfect Landing Page