Yahoo Search Marketing Changes Ad Rank in Search Results
Author: Joe Whyte
Today Yahoo! announced that come February 5th the way each ad is ranked in a Yahoo! search will also include a “quality” factor. Yahoo in their own words said:
“On February 5, 2007, we are introducing a new ranking model in the U.S. that considers an ad’s quality and bid amount. The new model is designed to help you spend less time in bidding wars and more time creating the most relevant, effective ads, which can help drive better results for your business. “
Yahoo! is now attempting to give ad positioning to more relevant and higher performing ads to help serve their customers better which is something that Google has been suspected of doing for quite some time now. This should help keep the pay per spam down and the quality relevant ads much higher “in theory”. Here is a quick graphical example provided by yahoo!.
Yahoo talks about ad quality and what is it?
What is “Ad Quality”?
Ad quality is determined by:
- The ad’s historical performance – its click-through rate relative to competitors and normalized for position.
- The ad’s expected performance – determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo!’s ranking algorithms, relative to other ads displayed at the same time.
Overall ad quality is displayed in graphical form by the quality index.
January 24th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
People still use Yahoo? I don’t think I’ve been to Yahoo in the last year except to get my flickr password.
According to a searchenginewatch.com, the Nielson/NetRatings for Google are 49.2%, while Yahoo is struggling at 23.8%. Sad that an industry they created has passed them by.
January 25th, 2007 at 3:40 am
As you mentioned, Google have been taking an advertisers ‘quality socore’ and ad relevency into account for some time now. The Quality Score is the basis upon which Google measures the relevancy of an advertisers ad to users and has a major effect in determining how much the advertiser actually pays per click. This means that to compete efficiently an Adwords advertiser must be aware of what they have to do to achieve a high Google quality score. This is now the route Yahoo is taking and Yahoo advertisers will needs to be aware of how to achieve a good ‘quality index’. For more inforation about what the google quality score is, how it is suspected to be calulated, and why advertisers need a big one take a look at this white paper: How Much You Pay per Click With Google Adwords