According to the Q2 US Search Engine Performance Report, Google continues to dominate the paid search engine marketing industry. During the second quarter, Google was responsible for 77.4% of all US search marketing dollars spent. Yahoo was a very distant second with 17.8% of the market and MSN captured 4.8%. Despite their much smaller market shares, Yahoo and MSN still prove to be great advertising investments for many Internet marketers. The best strategy is to incorporate all three of the major search engines into your PPC marketing campaigns.

If you use Google’s Adwords in your marketing strategy, you will likely notice some changes over coming weeks. The announced “tweaks” were made based, at least in part, on all the advertiser feedback Google has received from the program. This update will include three major changes:

Real Time Quality Score

Quality score was a concept introduced in 2005 in order to improve the quality of ads shown to Google users. Currently, Google utilizes a static per-keyword quality score. When you choose a keyword for your ad, Google calculates a quality score based on that keyword and it doesn’t change unless your ad changes. Going forward, there wiil be a system that evaluates an ad’s quality each time it matches a search query. This new system should help to increase the relavency of the ads shown which will benefit both users and advertisers.

Inactive For Search…Not Anymore

I’m sure you’ve had your fair share of keywords that show up as “inactive for search”. This happens as a result of a bid that is too low, given  your calculated quality score. Now that Google will be calculating quality scores with each search, your ad relivancy and quality score will change all the time. In reality, if your keyword is currently inactive, you are not likely to see a big increase in traffic due to this change.

Minimum Bid Gets Replaced

There will no longer be any minimum bids in Adwords. Google has decided to replace “minimum bid” with “first page bid”. This new amount will be of much more interest to marketers, as it is an estimate of the bid that it would take for your ad to reach the first page of search results. The first page bid amount will be based on the exact match version of the keyword, the ad’s quality score, and the amount of keyword competition.

Despite these changes, one thing remains very clear about Adwords. Quality Score matters! Be sure to take the time to research and optimize your ads for each campaign in order to keep your quality score higher, and your costs lower.