Earlier this week, I wrote about a problem that we're having where the Adwords Keyword Insertion function was not working properly . Apparently it's working just fine, or at least as Google has designed it.

To recap, in the ad text, you can put the following notiation:

{Keyword:Default text}

and it will insert into your google ad the text of the keyword that the user searched for. If the keyword doesn't fit, the Default text will get used in the ad instead.

But recently, instead of putting the keyword in the ad, it's been putting in the default text for some keywords, even though the keyword fits nicely in the ad.

Anomaly Explained  

This change happened suspiciously coincidentally to the recent Adwords quality score updates, but I just couldn't imagine why Google would intentionally decrease the quality of ad text by leaving out the keyword and inserting the default text.

Yesterday, I received conformation from Google that this is in fact related to the keyword quality scores.   According to the Google rep, the usage of the keyword insertion may not be performed if the quality score of the keyword is too low.

OK, let me get this straight.

Google rates my keywords and assigns a quality score based on my ad, the landing page, and whatever else they want to throw in the pot but won't really say exactly what they base it on.

For any keywords that get a "low score", the minimum bid price gets raised.  

There seems to be a scale of quality vs. how much minimum bids go up.   Many people are seeing the same old $5 - $10 minimum bids.   This must mean their algorithms have determined that your ads and/or landing pages are total crap.   Others are seeing increases to $.40 - $.50.   This must mean that you're not total crap, but it still ain't great.  

If you're lucky enough that the increases haven't priced you completely out of the game, you're potentially spending a good deal more just to get the ads running.

Now, if keywords are deemed low quality, not only are you taking a direct hit in the with the raised mins, but they stop the use of a critical feature that increases CTR -- the keyword insertion.   Google bases your actual CPC on your ad's clickthrough rates, among other things.

The end result:   Keywords that have "low quality" get keyword insertion disabled and raised minimum bids.   The default ad text results in a lower CTR which again lowers the quality more.   This increases the CPC that you'll pay for a given keyword. And look at that, the minimum bids have just been raised. What a happy situation.

See where that spiral is going? That sucking sound is coming from the Googleplex.

I'm all for Google cleaning up their advertisers and promoting "quality".  

Arbitrage players buying traffic for their MFA (made-for-adsense) sites isn't a business model that can survive, nor should Google support it.   In my opinion.  

MFA sites aside, I agree, three ads that are doing little more than promoting the exact same merchant just through three different sites is probably not a good user experience.

I'm down with all that.   Go Google Go.  

But, there are publishers who strive to build quality sites that have a brand and an arguable benefit, based on an affiliate marketing busines model.   We spend significant money and time on using Google's Adwords service.   Shouldn't we expect to get a more than a mystery thriller to solve for ourselves when our ads and keywords are handed a death sentence by an automated process that can't seem to distinguish "quality" as well as it should.

If you don't like my work, fine, I can handle that.   Just tell me why.  

If I want to solve a mystery, I'll pick up a book.