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:

1. The ad’s historical performance – its click-through rate relative to competitors and normalized for position.
2. 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.