Quality Score Factors answer by Adcenter REP
When I was going through webmaster world forum I saw an interesting question being raised,
Great White Shark asks
Can anyone please verify that if you have even one keyword or ad with a bad
quality score your account quality score can be damaged? Apparently, this info
came from someone that works at Microsoft.
Now we have a Adcenter Representive for solving problems and answering questions about Microsoft Adcenter PPC program,
adCenterRep Replies
” Today, we do not have a quality score that is available to customers in
the UI. However, we do evaluate the quality of queries to ads to landing pages.
Advertisers should work to ensure that there is an overall high-quality
experience, even at the keyword level. Poor query-ad-landing page is also a
measure of poor relevance that will inhibit ads from showing up higher in the
listings. “
Microsoft Ready to say Bye Bye to Yahoo
Microsoft is ready to Hostile or even walk away from the bid to buy yahoo since the 3 week long deadline is almost there. Microsoft has repeatedly said it is not willing to Raise the bid value anymore and are fixed at 31$ per share they are willing to Offer Yahoo.
Yahoo on the other hand has been stubborn to raise the bid Yahoo is probably looking somewhere in the range of 35$ per share.
Microsoft has warned before that they will take the case to the Share holders if yahoo does not accept the bid they are looking for. Analysts suggest a proxy fight is most likely and any tough stance from yahoo is not the best for its future since they don’t have much alternatives.
Adwords Ad-rank or Adrank how to perform best in adwords
Today adwords advertising is all about quality and relevancy. If you have good relevant ads you will have definite win win situation.
Mainly to be in top 3 of the adwords advertising you need to have a very good Quality score as well as very good relevant targeted page. SEO plays a small but important role for Good quality scores. A good landing page makes users happy and that is what search engines are looking for. Search Engines are looking to make sure best quality sites are served to their users. We have client sites ranking on top 3 in Adwords for long consistent periods mostly because of relevant landing pages created by us. Good landing pages help both in SEO and PPC. We optimize the same relevant landing pages for top rankings for targeted keywords and it works best.
Remember apart from Quality score and landing pages the factor that is more important is the CPC. If your bid is high enough to get through the top level eligibility then quality score will he you rank better and for a long time.
Adwords conversion tracking improved
Google adwords team have improved their conversion tracking algorithm to have each actions being tracked independently. Before we cannot track actions we set independently now we can setup different actions for the targeted business and track actions and conversions based on that.
Conversion tracking is a very important part of PPC advertising nowadays. Good conversion tracking will lead to best conversions also it will be great to track the different keywords which ones are better converting that way we get an idea on the conversions available for the site. Conversion tracking with Google analytics is the best and a very good long term solution.
Charged more than advertising bid- happened to you?
Have you ever been charged more than your advertising bid is some cases yes this happens. We did encounter this in some of our client sites. So what causes this after digging deeper we were able to find the mistake in this.
In programme like MSN ADcenter PPC we have 2 options where we can set separate bids for content PPC as well as the ad group. So sometimes the ad group will override content bid and this could cause a higher price even more than the bid limit since there are 2 different bids involved. Make sure you check this before searching for solutions.
Check to see if the bid optimizer is causing any problems
Make sure if you have your preferred position as 1 0r 2 sometimes this may override your max bid,
PPC Blogger
Free stuff ranking about you – hurt adwords advertising
I have seen many people advertise their information based products in Google adwords or other PPC advertising programme but in Search engines like Google many free stuff tend to rank better than the paid ads. So does Google worry about it . I would say no. People like free stuff much more than paid stuff they want to visit free websites and get their necessary stuff than buying online.
When something is sold that is already available for free online people tend to go get them free instead of buying them. This is the nature of Google users and google is very well aware of it. For them Customer satisfaction is the priority and more the customers are satisfied better its for their advertising programme so I am sure Google is not worried about free stuff ranking about paid adwords advertising.
PPC Blogger
Yahoo changed Minimum bid value – yahoo updates bid value
Recently yahoo has made changes to the minimum bid value you a user can bid for their PPC program. Before it was 0.10 $ standard for most of the bids but now it is not anymore that value. Your bidding depends on the quality of the ads and the number of click throughs it attracts. If the user likes the ad and if it results in more clickthroughs then your site will attact a much lower bid.
Also the value of the keyword matters when it comes to bid value. If the number of advertisers are more and if they are willing to pay more for that keyword then the minimum bid value for that keyword will be changed,
PPC Blog Jeff
Urchin Analytics software out of beta
I am sure if you used Adwords before you should have definitely used Google analytics. Google analytics is google hosted version of Urchin a popular Analytics software which Google acquired few years back. Its a very successful online tracking software which provides a useful user friendly platform to check the validity of your results.
Urchin had been running for a long time as a beta version. Google has a tradition of running their softwares for a long time in beta mode to get user satisfaction and once they get positive feedback they will make bring out of beta,
Urchin is a hosted software which Google analytics is Google hosted. You can download Urchin and install it on your server and you and use it to monitor your traffic and logs real time unlimited on many sites. Urchine costs 3000$ and I am sure its worth the cost.
According to official Google Analytics Blog,
“Urchin formed the basis of Google Analytics, released in 2005. But, while Google Analytics is a Google-hosted service, Urchin is software that you run on your own servers. This makes Urchin ideal for certain applications. You might use it if you:
want to analyze your firewall-protected content, such as an intranet
have 5 years’ worth of old server log data to analyze
need to know if your site’s visitors are getting “Page Not Found” (404) errors
need to have your site’s traffic data audited by a third party
need to create custom reports or integrate with other tools, like a CRM system
need to integrate your e-commerce logs directly with Urchin
“
PPC Management Team,
Chocolate and PPC – what do you learn from it
MSN adcenter blog has posted a very good insight on the keyword chocolate how it is searched who searches more, demographics etc.
“What’s the story of “chocolate”? As learned from data freely available to all adCenter users
There are more searches for Chocolate in February than any other month, but there are notable peaks throughout the year in June and October (a demonstration of appropriate year-round appreciation for the subject). Find this data in Monthly Traffic
Ads for “chocolate” in an average position of 2 have a higher CTR than other positions. Find this data in Monetization
Women tend to search for “chocolate” more than men, with 64.27% probability from 3/22/08 to 3/31/08. Find this data in Demographic
Most searches including the term “chocolate” skewed female from 3/22/08 to 3/31/08. Find this data in Demographic
The sweet spot for “chocolate” searchers from 3/22/08 to 3/31/08 are those aged 35-50. Find this data in Demographic
People in California, Texas, and New York searched more for “chocolate” than other states from 3/22/08 to 3/31/08. Find this data in Geographic
Campaigns including the keyword “chocolate” are very focused to chocolate as a food and not focused on chocolate in all its other iterations and meanings. Find this data in Keyword Suggestion, Campaign Association
Searches including the term “chocolate” demonstrate the many facets of the word, as a food, a name, a musical group, a breed description, a color, an ingredient, etc- Find this data in Keyword Suggestion, Contained
How can you use this information to improve your marketing efforts?
Understanding historical valleys and peaks enables better budget planning and campaign planning for both online and offline efforts.
Analyzing position and associated CTR will help to anticipate traffic, budget and potential interest in your terms and products
Researching keyword demographic data can help you hone your marketing message to the audience most likely to be searching for your terms. This is also a way to hone offline messages according to the audience you are attempting to reach — by answering their conversation in a manner similar to the way they began it with you.
Geographic and Demographic data gleaned from search can help you cross validate your offline message content to ensure you are speaking to the audience you intend to.
Specifically for “chocolate” there may be opportunity to expand this to campaigns reaching beyond the core food — primarily around ingredients.
Identify possible negative keywords by reviewing terms likely to include your core term.”
Alexa screws up its ranking algorithm – makes ranking change
Recently we saw alexa make a major change to the way the rank their sites. In my opinion their current ranking system doesn’t work and its worse than before. The new ranking is not something that takes the whole world as a picture it mostly sees users from US to judge the traffic to a site. We compare the current results with few of the sites we own / monitor and all sites that rank for US and getting lot of US traffic are pushed higher while sites that gets ton of Global traffic and lesser US traffic are pushed down.
So what even alexa did or tried to do has screwed up their total index IMO. Either they need to go back to their old results or they need to fix a lot of things before the new results work better.
Though Alexa results are skewed lot of new webmasters or site owners gauge that as a important way of judging the important of a website so if alexa is going to reward US sites over other country sites then I fear it will never be any more a place to visit.
alexa.com/site/company/announcement