We’ve mentioned before the countless changes being made to AdWords, especially those innovations recently announced at Google Marketing Next 2017 to help advertisers develop even more insight into how they can increase their revenue and ROI. Users are hopeful of these changes, but several others such as Google’s recent decision to ignore word order and function words in Exact Match have casted doubt, especially with many larger businesses who are already experiencing success with Exact Match type. One of the more recent changes to AdWords has been changes to Ad Rank thresholds to increase the weight bids carry based on the query meaning which is intended to drive more relevant queries to advertisers’ PPC ads. The change has many obvious benefits, however we have to wonder whether this will be beneficial considering many businesses may not necessary see better results, as they’ve experienced with other AdWords changes, if query meaning and bids themselves hold greater weight in AdRank thresholds.
As mentioned before, Google is currently making changes to AdWords, most recently the change to Exact Match in which Google will disregard word order and function words when deciding whether a certain query will trigger an Exact Match Type in an attempt to help advertisers appeal to a broader range of potential converters. While these changes are intended to be progressive, they have created much doubt among larger businesses, especially those who are already succeeding with Exact Match and believe blurring the lines will make it even more difficult for the most relevant queries to be converted. So, we have to wonder if the recent changes to Ad Rank thresholds will be effective since many businesses may not necessarily benefit from both query meaning and bids holding greater weight. Why?
Because intended query meaning does differ significantly based on the type of product and/or services, some businesses may not necessarily benefit from that. For example, when searching daily news, the intended query behind the range of search terms that would most likely make that search will not necessarily differ much based on word order, or other variations in the query. Daily news, news daily, daily news of today, daily news for today—basically all have the same intended meaning. However, with searches that require more specific queries to trigger relevant PPC ads, such as specific products, there may be less variation for an intended query to trigger relevant ads, making it more difficult for businesses with certain products and services to really benefit from the change.
On top of that, with bids themselves holding a greater influence in ad-rank, CPC will likely rise and advertisers will likely have to invest more, especially for highly competitive keywords. And for those businesses that will either struggle to maintain a higher rank with the greater influence of search query meaning, or don’t necessarily have the funds to win these bids, this adjustment may not necessarily be the most empowering for them. In spite of it all, however, Quality Score does still have some influence over AdRank, and so it’s important to optimize all those factors which contribute to it though it seems money is playing a greater role in whether you win bids for relevant searches or not.
