Google Says You Can't Buy The Top Ad Spot

The ad clicker should benefit the most

Wealthy businesses and smaller operations all compete fairly when it comes to testing ad quality, and thus a placement at the top isn't a divine right for anyone.
Ad quality becomes a bigger issue in the coming weeks, as Google plans to subject advertisers to landing page load time assessments. Speedier pages, which will mean those without lots of plugged-in third-party content, will receive better ad quality scores.

Google's strategy considers quality as king of the advertising and visitor relationship. Relevant search results are no longer enough; it might be suggested that certain competing search engines would suit people as well as Google does for queries.

Better ad destinations make the organic search results look that much more valuable. Google's strategic shift from quantity to quality ads over the past few months means they believe the company makes more money from a single well-conforming ad than several less-pertinent ones. Google isn't about to leave money on the table, and neither should its clients.

The issue of ad quality appeared in a post at Google's Testing blog. Alex Icev wrote about the team and process involved with ranking the quality of search results, and how that transitioned into work on the advertising side.

"We needed to change a system that was predominately driven by human influence into one that (built) its merit based on feedback from the community," Icev said. He detailed a little of the process behind this, especially in the context of moving poor performers out of view:

The idea was that we would penalize the ranking of paid ads in several circumstances: few users were clicking on a particular ads, an ad's landing page was not relevant, or if users don't like an ad's content. We want to provide our users with absolutely the most relevant ads for their click.

Even though the big change to scoring ads based on concepts like landing page speed hits everyone, we think the bigger spenders have an advantage, and always will have, when it comes to bidding for certain lucrative keywords.

The most competitive keywords spur advertisers to improve their all-around page quality. When all other factors are equal, the bid spend makes the difference. Advertisers spend more, and Google profits. With luck, the visiting ad-clicker benefits the most.

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