Improving Yahoo Quality Index

Posted on February 2nd, 2008 in PPC Search

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If you have done any advertising with Yahoo Search Marketing (Yahoo’s version of Google Adwords) then you have probably seen the Quality Index bar in your adgroups. Users familiar with Google Adwords Quality Score generally see this and think that the two are alike. Well, for the most part, they aren’t.

Google Adwords quality score takes into account many different factors about your landing page and ad CTR. They check the landing page for backlinks, domain age, keywords, affiliate links, and tons of other stuff (just like they do when determining where to put you in the search engine rankings) and base a lot of your quality score on that. A higher quality score on your keywords in google means you can bid less to have your ad shown.

For Yahoo, things are much more simple. A Quality Index is assigned to each adgroup that you create. The higher your overall CTR for that group of keywords that you’re bidding on, the higher your Quality Index. That’s pretty much it.

Here are some tips for improving your Yahoo Quality Index:

• Always Make Multiple Ads for Each Adgroup
  That way you can go with whichever gives you the highest CTR, delete the crappy one, and make a new one to test against the good one.
• Don’t Just Throw All Your Keywords Into 1 Adgroup
  Break em up into related groups of 10 to 20. Keywords that aren’t preforming well will drag the entire adgroup down. Throw out keywords that aren’t getting a high CTR after a while, or give them their own adgroup and make new ad copy for them.
• Make Ad Copy With Your Keywords In It
  When a user searches for a term, and your ad is displayed, the words in your ad copy that match words in the search term are bolded, giving you a higher CTR if your ad doesn’t completely suck.
• Go Read Other Stuff About Ad CTR
  None of these tips are that original. The bottom line is, your ad’s CTR is what determines your Quality Index for Yahoo Search. There’s probably a billion articles out there about improving ad copy, so repeating all that crap here would be kinda worthless. So just google it.