I am surprised I have not seen more reaction from the SEM community around the upcoming changes to the AdWords Quality Score reporting.
Google announced it last week, giving the SEM community a heads up that the reporting you see for your quality score will be changing "within the next several days." The change obviously is not live yet, but when it does go live, I assume I will then start hearing a lot of complaints and concern.
Truth is, Google said nothing is really changing with ad rank. The reporting on the actual one to ten (1-10) number you see for your quality score will change but the ad rank and the actual quality score formula behind the scenes has not changed.
Google said:
Important: This is only a change to how a keyword's 1-10 Quality Score is reported. It does not change how Quality Score is calculated in real-time for each auction. So unless you have automated rules tied directly to your reported 1-10 Quality Score, your ads should continue to behave as they did before.
That being said, I suspect a lot of AdWords advertisers will see their reported quality score drop when this goes live. And when they do, we will make sure to summarize most of those drops.
Forum discussion at Google+.
