Quality Score for Search Engine Marketing

The search engines (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) want two things to happen:

1. They want users to find what they're looking for.
2. They want advertisers to get site visitors whose intent that matches what's offered by the advertiser's site.

This way, satisfied users will return to the search engine for dependable search results, and advertisers can rely on a steady stream of clicks that result in conversions, and so keep spending advertising money with the search engine.

Years ago, in the early age of Search Engine Marketing, the search engines employed a pure auction system, whereby the highest-bidding advertisers gained the highest ad positions. While this seemed fair from the advertisers' perspective, it sometimes resulted in irrelevant ads appearing at the top of the search results page -- making it more difficult for users to find exactly what they were looking for.

So Google (followed later by Yahoo and Microsoft) decided to reward relevant advertisers (and punish irrelevant ones) by instituting the quality scoring system. With the quality score system in place, relvant advertisers may achieve higher ads position at an lower cost than irrelevant advertisers who are paying higher CPC.

The quality scoring system is based on a complex group and series of calculations that take into consideration the relationships among the words in keyword lists, in ad text and on landing page -- as well as many (possibly hundreds) of other factors that the search engines won't reveal, in order to reduce the likelihood that some advertisers will try to "game the system" and gain unfair advantage.

If your campaigns are having problems with their quality score, contact us at Webnatics for a free consultation!.