Here we go, "Quality Index" starting Feb 5th

[SonicReducer]

The days of bid for position are about to vanish as YSM rolls out their answer to Quality Score. Check your landing pages guys and gals!

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On February 5, 2007, we are introducing a new ranking model in the U.S. that considers an ad's quality and bid amount. The new model is designed to help you spend less time in bidding wars and more time creating the most relevant, effective ads, which can help drive better results for your business.

Here's a quick summary of this important change:

Both bid amount and ad quality will determine an ad's rank in search results beginning February 5, 2007.

This will replace the current method, in which ads are ranked by bid amount only (bid-to-position).

This is designed to allow you to focus less on competitive bidding practices and more on the quality of your ads.

By improving the quality of your ads and making them more relevant to users, you may be rewarded with a better ranking and/or a lower cost for your ads.

What is "Ad Quality"?

Ad quality is determined by:
The ad's historical performance - its click-through rate relative to competitors and normalized for position.

The ad's expected performance - determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo!'s ranking algorithms, relative to other ads displayed at the same time.

Overall ad quality is displayed in a graphical form by the quality index.

Other Important Things to Know

We recommend that you review your current max bids. Keep in mind you may be charged up to this amount.

Standard match type ads will no longer receive priority placement over Advanced match type ads.

Fewer Sponsored Search results may now appear at the very top of the page for certain search terms.

Starting on February 5 there will be a transition period during which forecasting tools will accumulate more data about the new ranking model to provide better traffic estimates.

[H20]

*Sigh*

Guess I have to use my adwords quality landing pages and quality mini sites to make the quality focused yahoo happy. My life's quality is going down.

We recommend that you review your current max bids. Keep in mind you may be charged up to this amount.

Not may.. will be charged up to this amount..

[TatiAnA]

Ad quality is determined by:
The ad's historical performance - its click-through rate relative to competitors and normalized for position.

I understand all the mentioned above except this part. Could someone elaborate and explain more about how the ad's historical performance factor?

[natekapi]

If no one is clicking your ad, then your performance is bad, and probably means that something about it doesn't appeal to its targeted audience. If your getting a lot of clicks, and your click through rate is high, then its probably better and more appealing, so it will perform better with the new system.

I'm kind of looking forward to this change. I need to be upgraded still though. But if they show you a quality score or something, then that would be pretty cool, and then I can work to make my landing pages and ad text better.

[Johu]

They're basically setting the new system up just like Google. If someone is bidding $2 on a term and getting a 1% CTR, and someone else is bidding $0.20 but getting over a 10% CTR (just an example here), Yahoo will most likely place the ad making them more money (the second one in this case) over the one making them less money. If you have Google campaigns, just copy them on over to Yahoo, and you probably won't see too much difference.

[flip]

YSM just doesn't get it. One reason I liked YSM is the simple, straight-forward bidding. But with Google, I am constantly tinkering with bids and my landing page to keep my "quality score" up.

The other reason I liked YSM is that it was different from AdWords. Now I will essentially have two AdWords accounts to worry over.

[bluesync]

Yeah, I don't like quality scores either... But I guess it won't kill us (hopefully not)... It'll just take a bit more time and testing... Blah, in it's initial stages, should be cake. Keep following along and you should be fine... Just hope they don't pull a Google and smoke everybody for $5 minimums

[Hypothermic]

This was in my birthday too.