Your Quality Index

A Quick Guide to Understanding and Improving It

You’ve seen the graphic display of your ads’ quality index in your secure account interface. It’s that little blue bar on each ad detail page that resembles the lighted bars you might find blinking on your stereo.

When all five sections of the bar are colored in blue, your quality index score is high. When three sections are filled in, your score is OK. When only one is filled in…well, you get the idea.

But what is this quality index thing, why does it matter, and how can you make it better?

It’s All Relative (and Relevant)
In a nutshell, an ad’s quality index is a relative measure of how relevant it is to users. In determining your quality index, our system takes into account your ad’s click-through rate compared to its average position in search results, as well as to that of other ads displayed at the same time, other keywords in your ad group, and other relevance factors.

Why Should I Care?
You should care because ads with a higher quality index can receive higher ranking in Sponsored Search results. Our system calculates an ad’s ranking based on your bid, your ad’s quality and other relevance factors. A high-quality ad may be ranked higher than a poor-quality ad, even if the poor-quality ad’s bid is higher.

Please note the graphic above is provided for illustrative purposes only

OK, so how do I Improve My Quality Index?
Your ad’s quality index reflects its ability to meet the needs and desires of users—that is, how well it helps them find what they want, quickly and accurately. If your ads don’t meet the needs of users, users are less likely to click them. Fewer clicks means fewer customers and conversions.

When this happens, nobody wins: not you, not us and not the user. High-quality ads, by contrast, can help create winners out of all of us. The quality index was set up to encourage advertisers to better meet the needs of users—who are, after all, the reason we are both here.

Here are a number of tactics you can use to improve the quality of your ads, and thus, your quality index:

Use relevant keywords—Make sure the keywords in your ad group are highly relevant to the ads in the same ad group.

Include your keyword in your creative—Using the keyword itself in titles and descriptions of your ad. You can use the Insert Keyword feature to help you do this automatically.

Take advantage of excluded keywords—Use this feature to block certain searches that you think may not be relevant. This can help keep your budget focused on more likely prospects. For example, if you sell portable radios but not ham radio equipment, you can block searches that include the word “ham.”

Use ad testing—You may have noticed that when you create an ad in an Ad Group, you are prompted to create another one. You should do this in all of your ad groups, because when you create more than one ad, our system will test the ads automatically. Ads that perform better then begin to appear more frequently in search results, and you can edit or delete ads that perform poorly. Try different copy, different offers or different display URLs to help determine what works best.

Gather intelligence—Almost all’s fair in love and advertising, so you shouldn’t feel shy about spying on your competitors. And by spying, we mean searching for their products or services so you can look at their ads—not breaking into their offices, tapping their phones or any of that illicit Watergate stuff, OK? Take a look at your competitors’ ads to determine if your offers are as strong as theirs.

Offer specials—Consider including special offers in your ad copy. Take a look at a calendar: It’s chock-full of holidays that you should consider taking advantage of. Limited-time offers, free shipping, two-for-ones, free gifts, contests and so forth can be very effective. Remember, it’s not just about your ad, it’s also about the value that users think you can deliver.

Resources

Bidding and Ranking Tutorial

Ranking Model Overview

Improving Ad Quality Blog Post Series

—Michael Mattis

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25 Comments Add your own

1. Weekly Roundup of Pay Per&hellip | November 9th, 2007 at 7:33 pm

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9. root123 | November 12th, 2007 at 6:00 am

Thanks for all the valuable inputs on Quality Index.
10. Mahesh Mohan | November 28th, 2007 at 1:04 pm

Once I got a 5 Bar Quality Index without doing anything. Maybe I wrote quality ads but I next time I got only 1 Bar.
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12. Robert Downs | November 28th, 2007 at 1:37 pm

A response to Dave in question 10.
Excellent point. I have tried seaching for my site “billiardbob” with the quote marks. This should exclude any other paid ads but, what comes up are paid ads for Bob Ballard. That is not me or my site. If he is using my site name as an advertised keyword he should be stopped.

I wonder if anyone is listening?
13. Johnny | November 28th, 2007 at 2:05 pm

I don’t know but Yahoo’s still the Best for me.

been with them for 4 years & not a single Problem
14. David Rader | November 28th, 2007 at 2:43 pm

No algorithms are perfect, that’s why every place is “constantly improving them.” They help though, a lot, as a car helps a driver, but he must still stay conscious.

Thanks for the guide!

Robert questions 13:
Likely if he paid for “bob” it would still come up. Most search engines work in the way that if you search for “anything in quotes” it will bring up normal results that are exact or very close to the quotes, but not always everything in quotes, depends on what’s available, and with adverts, I assume if someone paid for “bob” and someone searches for “bob lastname,” all paid “bobs” would show up, but not “bob differentlastname” if “bob” by itself weren’t selected as a seperate keyword…
15. mel | November 28th, 2007 at 3:31 pm

Yahoo Australia have artificial minimum bids (for example $1 for “last will and testament”) this completely undermines the Quality index. My service would have a very high quality rating because it is so economic, but it does not show because you can’t pay $1 a click for a product that only costs $10. It’s just a combination of greed and stupidity.
16. Ted Feely | November 28th, 2007 at 4:22 pm

Sorry, but I must agree with the generally negative comments by Dave and Mel. Since Yahoo purchased Overture, paid search has gradually become worse. Mechanisms for trying to induce higher and higher bids has left me indifferent to Yahoo. Problems I’ve brought to Yahoo’s attention bring promises of solution, then I hear nothing and see no improvements. It’s sad since better competition with Google would help (almost) everyone. Ted
17. james | November 28th, 2007 at 6:30 pm

I like the new ad system, it much easier to test ads. I like the new improvements. You still need to work on your search algo please. Someone needs to compete with google
18. amrs | November 28th, 2007 at 10:27 pm

I did a campaign with them and most of my clicks went to bogus ads related search engines. Kind of those search engines which only display relative adds from yahoo. something like meanwhile.com. yahoo should block or ban this kind of websites.
19. Jerry | November 29th, 2007 at 11:05 am

Yahoo has become a wild card. There seems to be no reason in ad placement vs quality vs bids. Our overall ranking has dropped since Yahoo purchased Overture yet our spending has increased and our quality rankings are generally 3-5 on our important keywords.
We had them “optimize” for us when they offered but the results we got back really did look like something done by monkeys on a keyboard. Totally random however our ranking did improve, just not for any valid reason.
20. Matt Ellsworth | November 29th, 2007 at 2:01 pm

great - thanks for the heads up. I will definately check into making sure this is maxed out.
21. joe | November 30th, 2007 at 7:18 pm

I wish Yahoo would go back to the old way of bidding, it was very easy to understand, either you had the mney or you did not. I am sure Yahoo would make more money, and better for my stock. I seen people bid 15.00 for a keyword… just an idea!
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