If you’ve been watching your PPC ad spend closely in order to squeeze more value from your AdWords campaigns, your advert text may well have been recently optimised. If so, you’re likely in a great position to capitalise on changes rolled out today across the AdWords paid search platform. If not, you could fall foul of new pay per click advertising quality score guidelines introduced today by search engine Google. More about New Ad Quality Score Algorithm

The changes to ad ratings are intended to increase advert relevance for each unique keyword search and also change the way adverts are selected for the sponsored search band at the top of the search engine results page (SERP). Improvements made to advert quality scoring will be particularly strictly enforced when selecting adverts to display in these prominent positions according to the Google Inside AdWords Blog.

With competition fierce the temptation has been to outbid rivals to secure the best spots, however Google will now intervene to ensure that the adverts displayed reflect the users search query as closely as possible. Adverts will only be eligible for the sponsored search area after surpassing a certain quality score threshold.

To date, the click through rate of an advert has formed a big part of the attributed quality score. This will continue to be the case but will be updated to account for the role of search position on achieved Quality Score. With higher positions generally leading to a higher CTR due to the better visibility, this portion of the equation will be modified to deliver more accurate quality scores.