First Page Bid Quality Score Formula
March 21, 2009
In our previous post, in which we alleged that the quality score landing page relevancy accounted for only about 5% of the weight…
We are now revising this statement…
- This is still true for the general Ad Auction formula perhaps, as CTR and Structure are the main components.
However, based on a comment from @richardball :
“Keep in mind there are different Quality Scores for search: ad rank vs min bid… Landing page (relevancy) is a big factor when setting the min bid (now first page bid) but not a factor when calculating the ad rank.”
Based on our experiments, shown below, I agree with Richard.
In our experiment on a brand new account… with no history:
- Although we had very tight adgroups, ie. good account structure and relevancy to Ads…
- Keywords were all assigned an initial QS of 2, ie. Poor, along with a high First Page Bid: $5.00
We wanted to test the landing page relevancy as the possible cause of this “slap”…
- We cloned the poor kws campaign and changed only the display and dest urls..
- we chose a third party site, that ranked high in the organic listing, ie. very relevant to the kw
Conclusion: We saw a dramatic jump in quality score, from 2 to 5 and 6, and a dramatic drop in First Page Bid, from $5.00 to 30 cents!
This proves that First Page Bid, at least initially, is heavily affected by landing page relevancy, contrary to our previous post’s allegation.
Certainly not only 5% power, as we previously suggested. In this landing page test, we have shown an exponential increase in QS, and a 96% decrease in the First Page Bid price, as a result of ONLY changing the landing page. Landing page relevancy is indeed very heavily weighted in the initial keyword quality score formula, completely counter to our earlier post.





2 comments:
Not sure if you've seen my related article (in which you get a namedrop!)...
First page bid is related to ad/landing page relevancy, but the indicated quality score is not - as I demonstrated with high volume keywords targeted to an irrelevant landing page via relevant/irrelevant ads http://www.search-engine-war.co.uk/2009/03/visible-quality-score-has-nothing-to-do-with-relevancy-at-least-initially.html
That explains a lot that is happening in the account I inherited. Thanks.
Post a Comment