This Week in Relevance

A few weeks ago, Microsoft’s AdCenter released their version of Quality Score (QS) into their UI and keyword reports. This is significant, as it will allow advertisers to make more informed decisions on keyword, ad, and landing page selection in AdCenter, which is continuing to gain share of searches and ad budgets.  We’ve had a chance to spend a little time digging into its similarities and differences to Google and would like to share our initial thoughts.

Similarities

At first blush it looks pretty similar to Google’s Quality Score — a single numeric score from 1-10 plus 3 qualifying, non-numeric subscores for keyword relevance, landing page relevance, and landing page user experience.  And while the algorithms to determine these quality scores are likely quite different between the two engines, we are not seeing a significant difference in aggregate click weighted quality scores for similar (if not identical) campaigns that are running on both engines.  Across a number of accounts, the deltas are somewhere in the 5-10% range, Google QS vs. Adcenter QS.

Differences

We see two major differences in how the two engines deal with quality score that should be critical to advertisers as they manage campaigns against these two engines.  First of all, AdCenter QS does not determine ad ranking as it does on Google.  Sure, many of the things that influence QS in AdCenter also influence ad ranking, but there are a number of other factors at work beyond bid and QS — we think that this should free advertisers up a little to not obsess over QS quite as much as they do on Google.  Use it as a diagnostic to determine where your campaign can improve, but don’t feel like you have to throw the baby out with the bath water and start over if you see quality scores below 6.

A second huge difference between the two is that Google assigns the same QS to a bidded keyword regardless of match type, so as long as your ad is relevant to your bidded keyword, you should be fine on broad/phrase match variants of that term.  This is not so in AdCenter. You could have a QS of 10 on your bidded keyword but if the ad or landing page does not line up with the queries you are matched to on broad/phrase, then quality score could suffer on those match types.  So what does that mean for advertisers?  Obviously it is even more important then on AdCenter to 1) exact match as much as possible and 2) leverage separate ad and potentially landing page strategies for the less restrictive match types.  Otherwise, your relevance, QS, and ROI may suffer on braod/phrase match, as we have heard from countless advertisers.

Endgame

So now that AdCenter makes Quality Score available, does it even matter?  Much like on Google it is algorithmically determined, so you just can’t control for a lot of that when managing a paid search campaign, especially a large scale one. The best thing you can do on either engine is to focus on the relevancy factors that you can control which should help you maximize the ‘potential quality score’ of your campaign, and use the numbers you see as one indicator of how successfully you are doing that.  These are things that you have a lot of control over and should drive universally solid QS:

• Relevance of your keywords to the products and services on your site (If you don’t sell it, don’t try to market it in search — this is especially true on AdCenter!)
• Relevance of your ads to the keywords in your account (If you don’t have the patience and tools to create ads that speak to each and every keyword uniquely, create fewer keywords!)
• Relevance of your landing pages (Meet users expectations when they land on your site — if you ad says one thing, make sure your landing page says the same thing)

These simple rules should help you maximize your ‘potential quality score’ for any keyword in your account. At the end of the day, focusing on what you can control and the actual dollar return of the campaigns, as opposed to the absolute 1-10 quality score, will benefit your business greatly and save a ton of frustration trying to ‘game’ AdCenter or Google.