If you’re advertising with Google AdWords, this new factor might influence the position of your ads and the minimum price you have to pay for your bids.
What is Google’s Quality Score?
Google’s Quality Score is Google’s method to evaluate the position and the minimum bid of a text ad in Google AdWords. Google hasn’t revealed all details about the Quality Score. All we know is that the text of an ad and the clickthrough rate are important factors that influence the position of your ad and the minimum price you have to pay per click.
Last week, Google announced that it would also include the landing page in the calculation of the Quality Score. That means that the web page that is linked to an AdWords ad will also be analyzed to determine the position and the price for the ad.
What does this mean to your AdWords ads?
If you bid for many different keywords, it might be that the prices for keywords that are only loosely related to your web site go up for you. The less a web page is related to the keyword, the more you have to pay to get an AdWords listing for that keyword.
What can you do to lower your per click prices?
To pay as little as possible for a click, you have to follow Google’s quality guidelines. The better your ad, the less you have to pay per click:
- Make sure that your AdWords ads have compelling titles that inform web surfers about what they can expect on your site.
- Use interesting descriptions that are related to the keyword. If possible, include a call to action or a reason to click in your descriptions.
- Create more PPC landing pages that are directly related to your keywords.
- Make sure that your landing pages are relevant to what web surfers are looking for.
Google’s latest change in the Quality Score won’t hurt you if your ads are compliant to these points.
Looks like Adobe just launched the Motion Design Center which has a wealth of information for users of Adobe and Macromedia products. It looks like they’re focusing on Flash and After Effects, but they’re showcasing designers and offering essays as well. Take a look, maybe you’ll learn a thing or two.
Firefox 1.5 has been released, the first major milestone since they released version 1.0. Some new features are, faster browsing, automatic updates, improved pop-up blocking and better security. Its the default browser on my PC, I recommend checking out a couple of extensions for web development Web Developer for a PC or Mac, and IE Tab if you’re on a PC, which embeds Internet Explorer in a tab within your browser, eliminating the need to open IE at all for me. Congratulations to the Mozilla team on a great browser and a nicely redesigned site.
I noticed an article on Signal vs. Noise this morning entitled, The top 5 red flags of software development. Though the article is geared toward software development, I feel that these things can apply to other web development projects, in fact I’d venture that almost any design or development studio has heard these comments in one form or another and cringed.
This lead me to another article discussing Getting Real with development. Its easy to program the process, skin the programming and fail to meet customer expectations by forgetting that potential customers aren’t as computer savvy as the designers and developers. Designing the interface first, back-end second can help ensure that your customers or client’s customers are in the picture at all times. Consider their needs, how they will react to the design and how they will navigate through your process. I like their points about keeping things limited to a one page story about what the application should do, if its too long, it could be too complex, if its less than a page, maybe your goals aren’t clear enough.
Remember, they are the ones using the application or service, they are the ones the project was created for, they are the ones that will support your venture, they can make or break your business model. If they are so important, why do you want to leave them out of the equation?
I’ll commend the British Library for their Turning the Pages online gallery, they’re offering a peek in some historic volumes, but I wouldn’t have recommended using Director for the implementation, Flash does a great job as you can see on one of our recent projects for renowned artist and designer, Larry Vigon. You have more control over the little details, the British Library’s gallery seems a little clunky to me.
