Know the (Quality) Score

4 ways to improve your quality index for lower cost and better placement

Editor’s Note: This is another in a series of posts we’re calling “The Best of the YSM Blog.” These are posts containing timeless advice and best practices that never go out of style. Even if you read it the first time, it’s not a bad idea to review this information periodically to help get maximum performance from your advertising.

Originally posted April 10, 2009

Everyone wants to score an A+ when put to the test. In ad quality terms, that would be a 5 out of 5. A quality index score of 5 generally means that your ads are well-written and your keywords are working with them, they’re getting clicked on regularly, and you’re giving users what they want.

And as with that good report card you brought home to Mom, your campaign management efforts are also rewarded with lower costs for your clicks and conversions. It could substantially improve the return on your advertising spend!

Many new advertisers think that ad quality has to do with keywords, when it’s actually about the ads themselves. If you want your ad quality scores to head north, focus on how your ads are written. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to ace the test.

The write stuff
You may not be a writer by trade, but you are in business and you probably know your product better than anyone. The basic principle of marketing is to provide a product that fills a need. So focus on what makes you different from your competitors. What’s your secret weapon, your special sauce, your unique angle? It might not be the product, but the service you provide. Do you offer free shipping, great customer support or overnight delivery?

Put yourself in the shoes of your target customers and think about what their needs are—then write them down! If you’re having trouble putting it into words, Yahoo! can help you optimize your account, including assisting with ad proposals. Or consider hiring a professional freelance copywriter. The extra money you spend should come back to you in higher sales and profits.

For more tips on writing strong ads, please visit our Help Center.

What’s key
A short list of keywords for an ad group is usually better than a big, long list of anything-goes keywords. You don’t just want a bunch of traffic, you want quality traffic that can lead to conversions. Your keywords should always be relevant to their associated ads, and the best way to accomplish that is to create multiple ad groups with a small number of select keywords that are highly relevant to each other. The fewer keywords you have, the better chance you’ll have of identifying what’s working and what isn’t.

Putting keywords in their place
Research has long shown that including the user’s search term in your ad copy significantly increases the likelihood of a click, which obviously is the first step toward closing a sale. This is where our keyword insertion tool can help.

Many advertisers let this nifty little tool go unused because they think it’s complicated, but it’s actually quite easy to use. Keyword insertion can help reduce the number of ads you have to manage and increase the relevancy of ads by automatically including in your ad the keyword that matched the user’s search query. Thus, you don’t have to create an ad for every keyword—just let keyword insertion do the work for you.

We recommend that you use keyword insertion with your title rather than your description. The title is the first thing that users read (and sometimes the only thing). With just 40 characters in the title, it’s easier to make the title relevant to all of your keywords.

You can learn more about how to use keyword insertion in this section of the Help Center.

Test time
When you create more than one ad within an ad group, you’re automatically setting up ad testing. This tool gives you insight into your ad’s performance and helps you identify the messages that drive the most potential customers to your site. Find out more about ad testing here.

Then test again, and again, until your score improves. And you thought all those tests ended with school!

— Kastle Waserman, Communications Manager, Customer Solutions