02 Apr New Quality Score optimization suggestions & Google Partners certification redesign

Busy weekend at AdWords 😉
This morning, entering the control panel of one of my campaigns I found a new notification with tips for optimizing your quality score, which I had never seen before.

Clicking on the notification leads to a section where you can see the suggestions summarized by campaign.

Opening the widget of a campaign, we come to the detailed definition of the optimizations already implemented and those still possible.

This particular campaign has almost everything suggested by Google, except for call extensions (the promoted website has not a call center), and maximizing the first page visibility of some keywords (which is linked to limited budget problems).
Switching to a completely different thing, today I also entered in the Google Partners control panel and verified that the company certifications area has been completely redesigned.  You might be wondering why I watched it on Sunday. And here I am to explain it 😉
Despite having passed the test for the display network and managing budget far above the minimum required to obtain the certification, my manager account does not match the minimum “quality” level requested for GDN campaigns.
Some months ago (probably at the end of October 2016), certification criteria have been revised to take into consideration the increasing spend in the network considered and the number of accounts that use that type of channel compared to the total managed (https://support.google.com/partners/answer/3126965#performance).
To keep the certification in a certain network is no longer enough to manage optimized campaigns in that channel, but you also have to constantly grow the invested budget and not to have many inactive accounts for that network. In other words, it does not matter only how good you are in doing that type of campaigns, but also how much are you pushing them with your clients.
This is unacceptable to me, and if Google will not change its path, it will soon lose one certified partner more (even if I have been doing it since 2005).  For budget choices in AdWords (and outside) I have always been considering (and always will do in future) only one referent: my clients.
Finally, to close with a funny thing, Martin Roettgerding yesterday published a post on some new extensions tested by Big G.  Among these there is also a “sloth” extension (which allows you to enter sloths images in the ad). I really liked it, and therefore he deserved at least one link: more details.
It is a real pity it was only an April fool, we would have had a lot of fun with sloths in ads! 😉
UPDATE: After having published this post Google retired my Premium Partner Badge – now I only am a “regular” Partner.  In fact you should have 2 certified professionals to retain it (but I am a lone freelance!).  What a coincidence, isn’t it? 😉