Yahoo’s Quality Index and Google’s Quality Score, Hints and Tips

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September 28th, 2007 by Nick

Yahoo and Google basically have the same idea as to what a quality score or index entails and how to calculate it. Both are a measure of how relevant the ad is, and both reflect the needs of users by taking into account the various relevancy factors and click through rate compared to its position and other ads displayed at the same time. Both also take into account the keywords in your campaign and decrease cost per clicks in accordance with quality score to give the advertiser an incentive to increase quality score. This is of course all a way of getting the end user to use their search engine over a competitor, as by giving the people a relevant ad and landing page they will deem the engine useful and therefore come back for more. The more visitors the engine can get, the more advertisers will spend to be part of the first page elite.

In Yahoo quality index is shown in a bar with the keyword it corresponds to, the more bars the higher the quality score. Yahoo calculates quality score as soon as the ad receives its first impression. It does this because any keyword or ad text the Yahoo’s editorial team have deemed to have insufficient content on the landing page or insufficient quality in the campaign they will delete, with out notice. You will then have to resubmit the deleted keywords or ad texts to the editorial team if you think there has been an injustice and they will review form there. Beware they do not give you the opportunity to increase quality score once notified, they will remove it. As Yahoo is on a lag, any quality score recorded or added to in the first click or impression will not be shown in the engine until at least a day after the event so you have to keep on your toes if you want to stay ahead of the game and keep checking the search results for your ad.

Google defines quality score based on the click trough rate of the ads and therefore the relevancy of the ad to the end user, this in turn determines the CPC. Google takes a lot longer than Yahoo to build quality score so the keywords for ads in very competitive areas of business will have to be high to keep the ads on the first page of the search results. Quality score will take effect slowly over the weeks but it will take a couple of months for the full effect to be felt.

To make the process faster for both engines you will need to be constantly monitoring cost per clicks, and therefore rankings. The landing pages need to be designated pages for the specific terms. Within editorial guidelines you need to have the keyword or phrase in the ad text as much as is possible both Google and Yahoo will check the relevancy from a build point of view and see if the campaigns are categorised out correctly with specific ad texts and keywords in the right groups.

Look at your competitors ads, are your ads as compelling as theirs? Could your offers be stronger? Often having prices in the text is a good idea, but only if you can feasibly compete with your competitors. Create different versions of your ads, and use the ad testing to help you to identify the ads that perform best based on click through rate and relative position. Use negative or excluded keywords to exclude your ad from some searches containing the terms that you have in your campaign, if you do not have negative or excluded keywords in your campaign you run the risk of having a low click through rate when your ad appears for searches that are unrelated to what you sell or offer, and you also run the risk of gathering unwanted click. All of this will lead to your ads being deemed not relevant and keywords becoming inactive for search.

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