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Yahoo’s Quality Score – Not Even They Understand It

by UberAffiliate on September 28, 2007 in PPC, Quality Score, Yahoo Search Marketing with 3 Comments

I was looking through a few of my campaigns in different accounts in YSM, and taking notice of things like CTR, keyword relevance, and landing page relevance, and linking that to quality score. Overall, I was left confused and without much indication of what really influences quality score. For example, I noticed a couple things :

Example A

I have 1 campaign that gets a lot of impressions and horrible click-through rate (about 0.15%). It’s one of the ringtone campaigns I talked about a few days ago. The keywords aren’t relevant to the ads at all, they’re not relevant to the landing page at all, and my quality score is 3/5 on them. I have another campaign that gets good volume. The keywords are relevant to the ad as well as the landing page, and the overall CTR is greater than 2%. Quality score is 3/5 on that campaign. Does this make sense? Uh, no…

Example B

I just started a new campaign a couple days ago. Ad group 1 is kind of a broad target, it gets more volume and the CTR so far is about 2.2%. The quality score on my ads is 4/5. Ad group 2 is very tightly targeted, gets less volume, and the CTR is 30%. The quality score on those ads is 3/5 bars.

Completely confused again, I decide to call Yahoo and have a nice little chat with them…

I explain my situation and examples, and after a little mumbo-jumbo, the rep says “I’m actually still trying to figure out their quality index myself…”. Later on in the conversation he says again “yeah, but right now how quality score is calculated is still pretty unknown.” Not even YSM employees know how quality score is calculated! He told me it takes into account :

-keyword relevancy in the ad
-historical data
-CTR

But didn’t really know how they factored each one in. From my best experience I’d say they weight it by :

-CTR (although even that’s shaky with the most recent example)
-keyword relevancy (keyword insertion in the title is almost guaranteed at least 4/5 for me)

Historical data doesn’t seem to make much sense as I’ve had that crappy ringtone campaign running for 7 months and the CTR is always awful.

What can we take from this? Don’t think you’re doing something wrong when Yahoo slaps your ads with a mediocre quality score, and don’t think you’re doing something right when some ads have a good quality score.

Dear Yahoo,

Give us some answers!

Love,
Concerned Marketer

Popularity: 4% [?]

Think Outside the Box : Actually Don’t Think At All

by UberAffiliate on September 19, 2007 in Affiliate Tips, Keywords, PPC with 5 Comments

There are many ways of doing affiliate marketing. Some ways work better for people, and that’s why they stick with that way. You always hear super affiliates talking about how you have to “think outside the box” and be a smart affiliate – which is DEFINITELY true. But sometimes just not thinking at all works well too. It’s not as easy as it was before (with Yahoo + MSNs slowly evolving quality score), but the not thinking method still works to an extent. The method is brutally simple: find a general offer that you think anybody would complete if the ad caught their eye (in my examples – ringtones – dun dun dunnnn), and test every kind of keyword out there.

While Shoemoney saluted uploading 20 million keywords in adCenter goodbye, this concept isn’t totally dead yet. Just go into Yahoo or MSN and start searching the most random and untargetted keywords. You’ll see a couple reoccurring sites promoting ringtones ;). Here’s the simple process I took with ringtones a few months back (and still have a couple of the campaigns running now). It’s nothing complicated, because the point here isn’t to think :

1) Picked an offer, ringtones were still pretty good 8 months back and it was when I first started affiliate marketing so I chose that.

2) Went into Yahoo (Google’s QS rapes these campaigns) and started searching for any random keywords that popped into my head. If I found a keyword with only 1-2 ads, I marked that down. Once I had my list, I picked some of the keywords and started researching keywords for the general niche those keywords were in.

3) Typed those main keywords into Wordze/Wordtracker (that’s what I used at the time) and got ~10k keyword lists for each niche.

4) Some of the niches I promoted ringtones in so you can get an idea (I’m not saying the ones I’m still in and are doing the best, sorry folks) :

-video games (profited with this)
-furniture (wooden chairs, couches, I actually broke even on this campaign)
-anime (can’t remember)

5) Made a base landing page, then swapped a dynamic header in there saying “Get {Niche} Ringtones!” or something like that.

6) Uploaded the keywords into Yahoo and bid $0.10. If the niche was converting, I upped the bids and got more volume at a slightly lower ROI.

My best campaign using this method was making around $1,000/day at it’s peak, which isn’t bad at all for a random niche having NOTHING to do with ringtones. Note that the $1k/day didn’t come from just that initial campaign. I was able to bid $0.50 with a really nice return, and I expanded the keyword list to about 100k.

For a couple weeks I tried figuring out what keywords were converting by looking at all my stats, but it was just huge lists of completely different keywords. I exclusively used YSM for those campaigns too, I didn’t mess with MSN a lot, or any smaller engines like Ask. So not thinking at all can still sometimes come in handy if you want to make a quick easy buck or two.

I’ll probably write future articles about thinking outside the box (I definitely will actually), but sometimes you can still “exploit” things and just completely forget there’s a box even there.

Popularity: 4% [?]

CPC Advertising on Facebook Now Open

by UberAffiliate on September 14, 2007 in Facebook/Myspace, Industry News, PPC with 9 Comments

UPDATED NOTICE : As of now, it looks like Facebook is going in and taking -maybe legal- action against affiliates using the system to their advantage. I have no clue why or what’s going on, but I would advise doing anything major with Facebook for the next few weeks until we get some more clear answers. Thanks.

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Facebook has launched a both CPC and CPM based advertising platform called Facebook Flyers Pro (the CPM is Flyers Basic). This application allows users to create flyers that are distributed throughout the network where you choose to target it. The minimum bid is currently set at $0.01, and it seems they have some sort of quality score in determining how much you pay per click. From their FAQ :

We select the best ad to run based on the cost per click and ad performance. We have a process in place that will automatically calculate the minimum price that the advertiser could pay and still have the highest cost per click Flyer, and the advertiser will only be billed that price. This price may be below the advertiser’s maximum cost per click. Because we lower the cost per click on your behalf, we recommend that you enter your true maximum cost per click when creating an ad – this will increase the likelihood that you do not miss out on clicks that you otherwise could have received.

What does initially attract me to this is the targeting options they have, here’s a screenshot :

screenshot of Facebook Flyers Pro

They have a number of pretty nice targeting options that would work out pretty accurately I think. I do know someone in the industry who tested a little with a cellphone ringtone-ish application, and he hasn’t had much success, but it’s only been on a small scale. Given these targeting options though, here’s what I would do (and probably will test) :

  • Turn the targeting to singles, ages 18-99, all education.
  • Use keywords like “looking for date”, “looking for chat”, “singles chat”, “looking for love”…just keywords like those.
  • Run dating offers all day and night.

Now I have no idea how this will work so don’t come after me if you lose some money because you set you CPC uberhigh and lost a nice chunk of cash. It is something to think about and something I’ll play around with and report results.

EDIT: After throwing some flyers up, it looks like the total of all your flyers’ daily spending limits can only be $50…which is pretty beat. Maybe they’ll update it as your account matures, who knows. Maybe I’ll shoot support an email and see if they get back to me with anything.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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