All posts in Yahoo Search Marketing

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% [?]

$200 YSM Coupon

by UberAffiliate on September 21, 2007 in Freebies, Yahoo Search Marketing with 21 Comments

It’s free coupon time boys and girls. $199 to Yahoo Search Marketing. Take it, test a new campaign and bid $3/click and find which keywords convert.

Click for cash money.

Popularity: 7% [?]

YSM Cracking Down On Low-Quality

by UberAffiliate on September 13, 2007 in Quality Score, Yahoo Search Marketing with 1 Comment

Yahoo Search Marketing is starting to tighten up with their quality score policies, and many affiliates may be hit soon (if they haven’t already). The new policy is that if you have too many “low quality ads” (which I think is 1 bar, maybe 2, I’m not positive maybe somebody can comment and clarify), they’ll just turn your entire campaign off. I’ve taken a screenshot of one of my “beserker” upload mass keywords and bid low accounts :

yahoo search marketing screen shot

As you can see, there’s a crapload of low quality ads in that account. As a result, about a week ago I got like 100 emails saying “Ad group 042 has been turned off at this time due to quality score issues.”

So what does this mean for the affiliate? Well, it means that it’s starting to become hard to go with the search and destroy method of uploading 100k bulk keywords into 1 campaign with untargeted adgroups and just bidding $0.10-0.25. While it does work pretty well, you’re going to have to start rebuilding your campaigns and breaking them down to more targeted adgroups where your ad quality score is higher. A temporary fix to this problem is to just download a copy of the campaign, delete the one in Yahoo, and then reupload it. That usually lasts a day or two before Yahoo comes and turns it off again. So it all just becomes a hassle and it’s going to be easier in the long run to just do things right.

On an off-topic note, I’m having a new header logo coming in soon to replace the ugly one up there now, so worry not fellow affiliates.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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