Google's AdWords Policy Update

The new AdWords policy focuses on enforcing standards of relevance, clarity and accuracy in text ads, ensuring that users aren’t misled by your ad messaging. Below are just a few of the specific rules now being enforced by Google (you can find the full list here):

Ads and keywords must directly relate to content on the landing page or the topic/business model of a site

Generalized call-to-action phrases such as Click Here or Click +1 are forbidden

No poor grammar or illogical ad text

Phone numbers cannot be used in sitelinks

I think this is serious stuff, especially for small businesses with limited time and money for search marketing. But there’s no reason for panic. Put down the Tums. There’s an opportunity here for small business marketers to reevaluate their AdWords strategies, find areas where results can be improved and even opportunities to save money.

With Google's increased focus on quality and relevancy, I believe that PPC marketers should use today’s news as a reminder to perform an audit of their PPC campaigns. There's no time like the present to find out if your AdWords account is suffering from quality issues. But PPC audits are totally complicated and time-consuming, not to mention expensive, right?

Wrong! Our free tool, the AdWords Performance Grader, is basically a PPC audit in a box. It really is completely free and it takes around 20 seconds to run and get a complete report on your AdWords account performance. For example, we’ll conduct an audit of the quality scores of the keywords in your account, and compare how your quality scores compare to those of other similar companies that we’ve recently graded, as shown here:

In this example, the advertiser in question has an average quality score of just 3.8/10. And you can see that they have quite a few impressions happening with keywords with quality score 3 and 4. That’s quite a lot worse than what we see in other, similar accounts (see the yellow, recommended curve), which have many more impressions happening on keywords with Quality Scores of 6 & 7! This advertiser is in the 15th percentile for Quality Score, compared to similar accounts we’ve graded in the past. Meaning, out of 100 similar advertisers, this advertiser ranks in the bottom 15%; they appear to be struggling with quality and relevancy issues in their AdWords account.

From wordstream