SES Chicago 2006 – Day 1 – Ads in a Quality Score World

How do you do better in a quality score world?

Joshua Stylman, Reprise Media

– Quality score is determined by a number of factors
– Google Adwords =  CPC x CTR (more relevant copy)
– Why make these changes – control over #1 position
– 2005 – Black Box – CPC, CTR, Landing Page, Ad Copy, others that aren’t transparent
– CTR not a good proxy for relevance, irrelevant landing pages, etc.
– Example of dramatic lowering of CPC once ad had a quality score
– Unintended impacts – artificial CPC inflation, Engine define “quality”, changes affect quality score
– Death of bid management, not really.
– How do you solve for an equation that you don’t understand

Andrew Goodman, Zero Page Media

– Two quality scores – one affects minimum bid, the other affects ad rank
– “Other relevancy factors” – tightness of relationship keyword – ad – landing page
– Relevant ads, ad keyword are critical
– How it works – see the public guidelines, human codes used to train algorithm
– Principles for ad quality raters are derived from user feedback on a large scale
– Adbots crawls landing pages looking for ”markers” a formula will determine score
– QS  Ad Rank – CTR still key
– You can fix some of these issues – Advertiser (A sports training facility) using separate page to test response on different domain
– Don’t be foolish
– Cheesy Landing Pages + Deceptive Offers – “There is No Sanctuary”
– Try country variance

Jonathan Mendez, Otto Digital

– Strategic services arm of Offermatica
– What is relevance? Contextual relevance.
– Segmentation + Targeting = Relevance
– Engagment
– Ad needs to be relevant to the keyword and the landing page
– Geotargeting – important to news growth

Brian Boland, Microsoft

– Was there for the question and answer session – Google was invited to the panel but declined to participate

SESChicago2006