Google changed their adwords system last week. I've not really seen much difference, possibly because the 3 accounts I have running for clients are fairly quiet markets. I know of some people who have had their key phrases made inactive and told to either change their phrases or push their maximum Cost Per Click (CPC) up to almost £3! That's a lot of money for a visitor who may be a potential customer. Trouble is conversion is the hardest part. It's all very well getting people to your site, but if you're paying for them to come then you need to make sure your web site is very worthwhile to convert visitors into customers.

I'm also wondering how Google decides on the "Quality" of a keyword. Apparently the activity of your key phrase is determined by the quality and max CPC. Who decides on the quality? I presume it's an automated system using their database of all searches performed in google to compare with, along with other advertisers using the same phrases. Personally I just think it's a way for Google to decide what's more popular and push the price up on it. Why else would they 'improve' an already working system?

Of course their help pages aren't much help as only one or two have been updated and the rest still talk about the old system. Okay, don't get me wrong, I often make changes and upload to a live site without testing (with funny consequences at times!) however a company like Google surely should have updated everything in synchronisation.

I'm beginning to wonder if the Yahoo adverts will rival Google's Adwords and possibly be better. Once people realise that there are other Search Engines out there that produce far better results than Google (just like once people realise that there are far better browsers out there besides the non standards compliant MS Internet Explorer) the internet will start to be a better place, and get more interesting to boot.