Impact of Google's July 11th Quality Score Change

Google unleashed a major change to its AdWords Quality Score system, whereby a Google algorithm/bot assesses quality of an advertiser's landing page. Here at my firm we've seen only a minimal impact on all but a couple of our advertisers; the couple who were affected have business models that are akin to affiliate marketing or search arbitrage.

Many AdWords advertisers who are engaged in click arbitrage more directly, however, reported huge rises in minimum bids and many had to kill their 2-3 year-old AdWords campaigns altogether. Perhaps the best piece of data on this comes from Michael Gray (aka Graywolf), one of those SEM/SEO long-standing wizards who knows his s#!t. Check out his great blog post which includes graphs charting CPC, profit and volume from his campaigns pre and post 7/11. Below are two very revealing charts from his post:




As you'll see, for some Google's 7/11 has become their own financial 9/11.