This letter was sent out to Inside Adwords subscribers yesterday:

From: inside-adwords@googlegroups.com [mailto:inside-adwords@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Inside AdWords crew
Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2006 6:18 PM
To: inside-adwords@googlegroups.com
Subject: [Inside AdWords] Ads quality and you
Earlier this week we caught up with Nick, Product Manager for our ongoing ads quality initiatives, about a change to the AdWords system that you may notice in the coming weeks.

“My job at Google is to watch over the quality of the ads we deliver to our users and to design ways to increase the quality of those ads. We believe that ads provide valuable information when they are highly relevant to what users wish to find — and that by showing high quality relevant ads, users will consider ads as a first choice when theyre searching for products and services. At the end of the day, our users benefit from relevant ads and our advertisers get more qualified leads over time.

We constantly evaluate how our users interact with the ads we display and look for opportunities to show more ads when we think theyll be useful — and fewer ads when we think that users might not want to see them. With this in mind, on queries such as car insurance or flowers, we try to show a wide selection of relevant ads to our users. And, for queries where users are most likely not interested in a product or service, such as dog friendly parks in Mountain View, we may aim to show fewer ads.

Starting today, and over the coming weeks, well be implementing an ads quality change designed to show fewer ads on queries for which our users might prefer not to see them and more ads on queries for which ads are useful. The impact of this change will vary from advertiser to advertiser, so we wanted to give you a heads-up and suggest that you keep an eye on your keyword performance over the next few weeks.

If you notice a decline in impressions or clicks on some of your keywords, you may wish to ensure that your most important terms are each specifically entered as keywords in their own right, rather than relying on broad or phrase match to include them. Or, if you notice an unwanted increase in impressions or clicks for some keywords, consider adding negative keywords to more finely tune your targeting.

Were always looking for new ideas on how we can improve the quality of the ads that our users see, so please feel free to send us your suggestions — well make sure they find their way to Nick.

Posted by Blake, Inside AdWords crew

So, it looks like AdWords is thinking about displaying more ads on certain terms like “car insurance.” Interesting stuff - especially if you think about how horrible Ask.com used to look with tons of paid ads above-the-fold. Hopefully they wont take things too far.

For commentary and analysis on this subject check out Danny Sullivans post.

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