If you advertise in paid search listings you want to rank well, but how do you go about achieving a quality ad campaign? In the session "Ads in a Quality Score World" the panel looked at quality factors and gave tips about increasing the relevancy of your campaigns.

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Tomaso Pozzi, Product Manager, Core Model & Optimization, Yahoo Search Marketing, said his company defines ad quality as the measure of the relevance of an ad to a user.

Yahoo looks at ad campaigns, the data, and keywords. It matches this data with performance data like impressions and clicks. Keywords, ad copies and user queries are key to analyzing ad quality.

The Yahoo Quality Index is a representation of your Ad Quality. It tells advertisers how well their ad is performing for all the keywords in an ad group.

Use relevant keywords or else you will pull down the quality index for your ad. You should split ad groups so that lower quality keywords don’t bring down the quality score of your higher rate keywords.

Summary
- Ad quality is the relevance of an advertiser ad to a user
- Campaigns, users and performance affect ad quality
- Keywords, ad copies and queries a the key areas.
- Quality index can help you raise your quality score and improve ad relevance.

Richard Simms, Anchor Intelligence, said there is a quality score for both advertisers and publishers. There are limitations with quality scores fore search marketers.

Anchor quality scores focus on the value of each click along a continuous spectrum. Some traffic is high quality because it has a high probability of performing, meaning it is likely to lead to conversions.

Anchor helps advertisers manage spend when there is little data about conversion. By aggregating traffic scores at the keyword level advertisers can manage spend for keywords where performance data is virtually unavailable. Conversion for ads is only 1-2 percent but this data can improve that leading to better performing campaigns and higher return on investment.

Jonathan Alferness
Group Product Manager
Google

Jonathan Alferness, Group Product Manager, Google, said the company is seeking to drive value back to its advertisers, meaning a greater return on investment. It is crucial that search is separate from advertising.

Alferness says the better ROI Google can give its publishers the more publishers it will have which leads to better ads and more advertisers.

Like Yahoo, relevancy is the key for quality scores at Google. Google uses the wisdom of the crowds to determine relevance. It’s all about clicks, queries and click through rate and ultimately ROI.

Quality Score Misconceptions:

1.Match types don’t affect quality score
2.Ad position does not impact quality score
3.Quality score is not impacted if the ad is not shown
4.Conversion rate does not affect quality score
5. A few days of bad performance will not ruin your quality score

If your ad is not displayed on the first page Google now will tell you what your bid would need to be to get you there. You should change your ad to improve your quality score to lower their minimum cost to get your ad to appear on the front page of the results for a keyword search.

Google has recently released Bid Simulator that allows you to experiment without spending any money.

Remember, it all comes back to your users and your customers.

Tom Cuthbert
President and Founder
ClickForensics

Tom Cuthbert, President & Founder, Click Forensics, good quality is all relative. You need to understand what is good for you the advertiser not just what is good for Google and Yahoo. Click Forensics thinks about quality all the way through to conversion.

Getting good quality:

1. Know what "good" means to you. What is the value of a click? Is it the right traffic?
2. Leverage all ad provider tools.
3. Find third party tools that compliment.
4. Monitor traffic quality metrics and ROAS.
5. Identify invalid traffic and submit for credit.
6. Block bad traffic sources (block lists)
7 Optimize, optimize and Optimize!