We’ve seen some recent behavior in Google AdWords markets where a new ad campaign immediately gets a quality score rating that forces minimum bids into the $5 range. There was a time when you could launch a campaign and immediately count on a few inexpensive clicks to get you started, but that day appears to be gone. Instead, the new account has to arrange to buy a few expensive clicks at $5 to get the quality score reset to $1, and a few more expensive clicks at $1 to get reset down to a price that’s competitive. That’s true even if the keywords you are bidding on are so long-tail that no one else is there – you simply need to ante up to play.

As mercenary as this seems, we think there’s something deeper going on. Google has never been an exclusively bottom-line focused company. Their timeline spans years, not quarters, and we believe that ultimately this change is not a short-term revenue strategy. To put it another way, although Google is in the business of selling clicks, their goal has always been to get the most clicks that actually provide value to consumer and vendor alike. With that in mind, we can see this new quality score as the first tentative step into a much more sophisticated exploration of ad quality.

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