The Quality Impact

Four lessons in how ad quality can change your minimum bids

No doubt you’ve heard plenty of times that “It’s not quantity, but quality that counts.” You might have an older relative who also reminds you that “You can’t get blood from a turnip.” (Or is that a stone? I forget.) But even if you’re not fond of clichés, for Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers, quality—your ad quality—is more important than ever, given the upcoming change to the way minimum bids are set.

Why is ad quality so important?
• With higher ad quality, in some cases, you may receive a lower minimum bid.
• With higher ad quality, you may be able to achieve better ad positions for the same price.
• With higher ad quality, your ads should be more relevant—so more users should click on your ads.

Here are four tips to help you manage your ad quality:

Tip #1: Track your ad quality
The quality index is displayed for both ad groups and their associated ads on the Ad Group details page. Use the Ad Performance Report, which is available in the reports tab, to help you know how your ads are performing.

Tip #2: Write better ads
It’s wise to include the keyword you’re bidding in the title description of your ad. This can make your ad more relevant to potential customers. Highlight the strengths of your product or service and use a landing page that is specific and relevant to users’ search queries. Update your ads regularly, too. You can learn more about writing better ad copy here.

Tip #3: Ad testing with optimization
Your minimum bids are based on individual keyword and ad combinations, so testing ads can reveal which ads work best. Use ad optimization to automatically display the ads that are being clicked on more often. Here’s more information on ad testing.

Tip #4: Group relevant keywords together in your ad groups
Make keywords in an ad group relevant to each other and to their ads, which can increase relevance to users. Your quality index looks at the normalized click-through rate for all keywords in an ad group, but pay special attention to high-volume keywords. Because they are displayed more often, they can affect your quality index more than low-volume keywords.

With these simple tips in mind, it’s good to continually monitor for any changes. So, the maxim “It’s not quantity, but quality that counts” can be true as “There are truths in some clichés.” Or is that another cliché?

Either way, keep an eye on your quality, and I’ll keep an eye on my overuse of clichés.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

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13 Comments Add your own

1. Pay Per Click Journal | March 17th, 2008 at 1:52 pm

Great article. Too many people think having more ads will be beneficial when it’s quite the contrary. Quality is key!
2. Pay Per Click Advertising&hellip | March 17th, 2008 at 8:56 pm

[…] The Quality Impact […]
3. AdTactic | March 18th, 2008 at 1:05 am

Thank you. Great article.
4. Ken Green | March 19th, 2008 at 1:43 pm

Hi,

In the middle of the Holiday season, mid November, Google kicked in what min-bids that resulted in over a 37.6% increase in out advertising cost, forced us out of a number of profitable keywords that resulted in Pacific Wine to cut or Google advertising by 90% by late December. Is this what we are to expect from your new program?

Google had no appeal process so the software they wrote ran un-checked even after many contacts with them over a 6 week period till we dropped most of our advertising. The software logic as best we can tell looks at the number of hits their search is getting for a specific key word. It then compares that volume to the Google revenue for that keyword. It seams that if there profit is below there budget they access an increase min-bid on that keyword. They then deceive the advertiser, us, by claming that the reason we are access the min-bid for our ad is that it is not relevant or that our landing page, URL is not relevant to the keyword or to the Ad. We spent weeks disputing there ruling on our keywords till they just said Customer Service can do nothing to change the min-bid logic in the Google software.

For example, we are a wine shop, we sell Champagne, lots of it, So our key word CHAMPAGNE or BRUT CHAMPAGNE that went to http://www.pacificwineclub.com/shop/Searchresult.aspx?categoryid=11, was hit with a $5.00 min-bid even though we have 4 pages of Champagne and our Ad was specifically for Champagne. No mater how you look at it we were very relevant to the keyword in question. Looking at other Ad appearing a week later we fond that we listed four times more products, champagne, then any other ads did so we were the most relevant. One completive ad not charged the min-bid was for a champagne color sofa.

You see that for generic key words that all advertisers have low conversion rates so to use relevancy to only post the best ad is one thing but to access unfair pricing is wrong. Google hit us with a number of $1.00 min bids for keywords we were, before there min-bid program hit, were in position #1 or #2 at a .30 bid. They also hit us with a number of $5.00 and $10.00 min bids. That is just wrong.

We were in the process of moving our Spring 08 to Yahoo, as we are not going to use Google. So now what are we to do,?

Ken Green
5. kam | March 19th, 2008 at 1:58 pm

this takes a lot of time and effort but in the end its all worth it.
6. The Unit | March 19th, 2008 at 4:44 pm

Yahoo really gives you a great bang for your buck. I pay a lot less for Yahoo ads than Google and my relevance of the ads is strong for both Yahoo and Google. It pays to have relevant ads linked to your pages. In many instances you can pay pennies for clicks to your site over ads on the same page that are really irrelevant to the search term. Those people should pay more since they are ususally taking a person to a page that is not really what they are loooking for in the first place.
7. Online Coupons | March 19th, 2008 at 11:49 pm

Although Google seems to have most traffic and generate a lot more clicks, we get better economics with Yahoo as there are no $5.00 etc. min bids.
8. InternetMarketingAdvice.n&hellip | March 20th, 2008 at 7:05 am

[…] - Search planners have to deal with Google’s quality score and Yahoo’s quality restrictions. […]
9. Jeffrey Tonetti | March 20th, 2008 at 9:31 am

We have seen substanial improvements to the Yahoo Search Marketing platform. Our company has been a heavy user of Google Adwords, but with the recent changes in the Yahoo Platform we are begining to feel it is safe to put our “toe in the water” especially with the addition of Quality Score.
10. JB | March 20th, 2008 at 9:58 am

if you are in niche markets, quality scores can kill you. i don’t want people clicking if they are browsing so i word ads geared towards serious buyers. Why make it tough for the little guys.
11. Vincent | March 20th, 2008 at 12:57 pm

Re: Google. Imagine getting a 35%-65% click through rate (CTR) with ads and a 25% conversion rate at the web site? Pretty good right?
Then Google tells me my ads and landing page are not relevant and(slapped me). Increases my bid prices to $5.00 per keyword on 164 keywords. WOW. I dealt with it and re-created the entire campaign. Made 21 ad groups. The results. Lower CTR. The point is human relevance is better than a computer looking at keywords and making a decision. I’m the human. Nothing replaces the human brain. Now my Google campaign is running poorly. But my Yahoo! campaign (a copy of the original Google campaign) is now beating my Google campaign. The point is if a human had looked at my campaign they would have seen it WAS optimized and running great. Looks like Google is putting their own profits ahead of what searchers want. I hope Yahoo! does not make the same mistake.
12. K.P. | March 22nd, 2008 at 8:11 am

Thanks. Great article. Very informative.
13. Svizzera | March 26th, 2008 at 4:37 pm

I hope we will not see minimum bid requirements of $5.00 and more per click as is the case with Google! We are a small business and simply can not afford this. It would be the end of our advertising campaign.