The changes made are said to improve the algorithm for evaluating the landing page quality and incorporating landing page content retrieved by the AdWords system, in an effort to phase out advertisers trying to get cheap traffic to poorly designed landing pages. The landing page quality will be provided with the Quality Score for contextually-targeted ads and will be evaluated using the same process used for ads on Google.com.
The new algorithm has only been in place for a short time but Google advertisers have already started to voice their opinions. It seems advertisers will now have to bid higher in order to reach the top of the listings for certain keywords.
Nick Fox, Senior Product Manager for Ad Quality at Google, said the new column was Google's effort to "improve transparency" and "make it easier to understand the quality score." He also explained that Google hoped the new Quality Score information would "help advertisers optimize their ads".
In response to the immediate complaints, Fox said that the main keywords affected will be those that are not driving traffic; in some cases the minimum bids will actually go down.
There are many advertisers offering landing pages with only Google or Yahoo! ads - and these are the advertisers expected to be affected by the change first. This process, known as click arbitrage, involves buying inexpensive pay per click traffic. The advertiser then hopes that each visitor will hit the landing page and then click a higher-paying ad (often Google AdSense or Yahoo! ContentMatch) to leave the page. As a result, many click arbitragers have either no content on the page other than the ads or just enough content to influence the AdSense ads.
