SES, San Jose 2007: Ads In A Quality Score World Session

More and more, ranking well in paid search listings is less about how much you pay and more about the "quality" of your ad campaign. But what goes into making up your quality score? In this panel, a closer look at quality factors and tips on increasing the perceived relevancy of your campaigns.

Moderator:

• Danny Sullivan, Conference Co-Chair, Search Engine Strategies San Jose

Speakers:

• Jonathan Mendez, Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, OTTO Digital
• Brian Boland, Group Marketing Manager, Microsoft adCenter
• Gulshan Verma, Director Product marketing, Yahoo! Search Marketing
• Nick Fox, Senior Business Product Manager, Google
• Andrew Goodman, Principal, Page Zero Media
• Joshua Stylman, Managing Partner, Reprise Media

First to throw light on the subject of Ads In A Quality Score World is Joshua Stylman a Managing Partner of Reprise Media. It is through Quality Score that search engines rank advertisements. These days, instead of the earlier practiced bid-based (employed when pay per click was still blooming) system the three top search engines use a quality score system.

Stylman even questions whether sticking to Google's quality laws heightens your advertisements' relevancy. Speaking from personal experience, Stylmam says that adhering to Google's quality laws only brought down his conversion rates.

Stylman also mentioned that in Panama, branded terms have experienced a 25 % rise in CPC. Besides, CPC of branded terms fell by 58 % whereas non-owned branded terms saw a hike of 42%.

Page Zero Media's Andrew Goodman was next. Goodman began by classifying the three generations of paid search advertising as:

• GoTo.com/Overture: pure bid for placement model.
• AdWords 2.0: Max Bid X CTR
• AdWords 2.5: Quality Based bidding

Goodman states that if landing pages are inapplicable to the keyword used or are intrinsically "bad". Also, Andrew discourages against making numerous accounts, privacy-intrusive data collecting etc to ensure a good ad rank. If one of the above mentioned have brought your rank down then starting a new one and starting clean is a good idea.

OTTO Digital's Johnathan Mendez is next to speak. He starts by saying “If you’re worried about marketing to your quality score you will not be successful. Market to your customers and quality score will take care of itself.”

Points that Advertisers must keep in mind to create effective advertisements are:

• Advertisements must be targeted on the basis of segments
• Get an idea of user intent on the basis of their queries.
• Keywords should be differentiated on the basis of their intent.
• Click through rate and CR optimization.
• Boost the significance of landing pages.
• the advertisement should message the requirements for the user and not yours.
• Continually test and optimize your ads.

Q & A with the representatives from the three search engines- Brian Boland (Microsoft), Gulshan Verma (Yahoo) and Nick Fox (Google).

Nick Fox reassures that relevance is relative to quality score and not to worry about other nitty-grittys. Boland declared that Microsoft will be unveiling a new quality based ranking component within the coming weeks. Brian Boland declared that Microsoft has good quality users and high converting traffic. Quality is imperative for Microsoft as they have faith in advertisers, search engines and ad publishers.

Tips:

• Strong title results in doubled conversion.
• Its all about user experience.
• Low quality keywords absolutely depreciate ad quality scores.

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