The Fundamentals of Quality Score in Search Engine Marketing

Search Engines, (Google, Yahoo, MSN) have common goals
· They want users to find exactly what they are searching for
· They want advertisers to offer what the searchers are looking for.

In return
· Satisfied users return to engines to depend on search results
· Advertisers see return on advertising spent and advertising more money on engines.

Years ago, engines deployed on purely auction system to decide on advertisers’ position. This may sound fair to advertisers with budget and willing to invest but making difficult for users to find exactly what they are searching for. E.g. HP could bid very high for Dell keywords. Resulting users do not find exactly what they want at the top of the page, and relevant advertisers do not appear on Top.

So Search Engines decided to reward relevant advertisers with a Scoring systems; starting with Google, and Yahoo to follow on 28th April 2008 for South East Asia, and MSN. In this case, relevant advertisers rewarded with better positions and lower cost per click, and competitors get to pay a higher cost per click; relevant advertisers benefit from more click as position is higher, and better ROI since cost is lower.

So Quality Score is important, but how do advertisers get good quality scoring on SEM campaigns? Search Engines do not reveal the full algorithm of Quality Score, but in general, we could
· Build small adgroups consist of small number of keywords closely related to each other
· Write relevant ad copies that contains the keyword, dynamic keyword insertions, or DKI can be a good approach
· Contain searched keywords in the landing pages