As I mentioned yesterday, on 22nd April 2014, Google is going to make a big announcement about “improvements” to Adwords.
I took a stab at guessing what those changes will be. Today, as a bit of fun, I’m going to tell you what I’d like the changes to be:
Dream change #1: No more quality score
Either go back to bid price x clickrate, or, even better, change to pay per impression.
Google’s Quality Score algorithms are deeply flawed (read this for an example of just how flawed) and incredibly opaque.
Not only that, but by using “ad relevance” – and making it such an important part of the algo – it greatly restricts what advertisers can say in an ad.
Changing to CPM turns the game into, “Who can make the most money from an impression” – and market forces will ensure the level of relevance the market desires.
BTW, The reason I’d prefer CPM (i.e. pay per impression) to bid price x clickrate is that the latter still includes Google estimates.
The only downside to CPM is that it could encourage Google to make broad match even broader.
Dream change #2: Search partner only campaigns
Search partner traffic can behave very differently to Google search traffic – particularly if much of that partner traffic is coming from shopping sites. As a result, the cost per conversion is likely to be different.
So, it’s only right we should be able to bid on it separately, and have different ads for it.
Dream change #3: Search partner breakdown and bidding
I’d like to see data for each search partner. And I’d like to be able to adjust bids at the partner level.
Dream change #4: Tablet bidding
I have clients who’s tablet CPA is much higher than their laptop/PC CPA. And I have clients who have a lower CPA for tablets… but that’s no use to me, because Google took away the opportunity to do anything about this. That was a BS move. It’s time to reverse it and allow us to have tablet only campaigns and tablet bid adjusters.
Dream change #5: Proper search query reports
Back in olden times (I’ve been doing PPC since 2006), search query reports would provide data for search terms that got a lot of impressions, but no clicks. That was really useful.
I want search query reports that give data for any search term with 10 impressions or more.
So, those are the 5 things I would love Google to announce on Tuesday. What’s the common thread? Each one puts more control into the hands of the advertiser.
Unfortunately, that’s not the way Google is going… so I suspect there’s not a cat in hell’s chance we’ll get any of these.
Steve
