Will The Yahoo Quality Score Bar Become The New Google PageRank

So a few weeks back I attended the Yahoo Search Marketing presentation in Hollywood. Towards the end of the presentation they started to cover the new bidding system including the new quality score.

The last few slides shown were basic examples of 5 companies bidding on a term and how your example ad was positioned based on your quality score and bid. In these examples the quality score bar was shown with your bid, showing how your quality score effected your position and what was bid.

What happened next got me to start thinking about this. Once the panel started taking questions about the new bidding system the majority of the questions ( about 90%) were focus on the quality bar, i.e. "if more then one person had a score of 5 on the bar who shows first".

Once the Yahoo reps started telling people not to focus on the bar and that the bar was just a simplified representation of your actual score I started having flashbacks to past SES and Pubcon sessions where Matt Cutts and other Googlers were pushing us not to focus on the little green bar in the tool bar and it was just a simplified representation of a sites over all rank.

So I guess I'm wondering if anyone else has been wondering this. Are we going to start seeing questions like "My ad has a score of 5 but I'm still not showing on the first page of sponsored results, what's wrong?"

 

I honestly think the 'over-simplified' bar is a dumb idea. If they want us to be competetitve and write better ad copy, why not give us an actual number. And then, give us the number to beat (like the guy above us, or the guy in the number 1 position) so we have goals to shoot for. This system is no better then the "I have a PR6 but no traffic what am I doing wrong!" bits. Without knowing what the competition is doing, it's just another magic bar that means almost nothing.

 

I wonder how long before we see people selling their ad writing skills based on the average quality score of their past ads.

I can just see the buying and selling now "Ad writer looking for work. Experienced in Yahoo Panama Quality Score. Past average Yahoo QS 4.2"

I guess it's time to start collecting your QS data so you can use it to sell yourself.

 

What kind of CTR do you have for 5 bars?

 

The bar is an actual number. 1-5.

 

Depends on the term and how other ads are performing. the term "widget" could have a CTR of .2% but because everyone else is performing at .15% you get a shown quality score of "5". But since "Blue Widget" is more targeted your CTR might be 2% and you still have a quality score of "3" because the other ads around you are running with a CTR of 3%.

If you ask me this is just going to distract people from looking at the real metrics for determining if something needs to be optimized, like keyword and ad CTR, ad conversion rate, and things like that.

 

I agree! Would be more helpful if they can give us actual numbers and give us the choice whether we want to beat that guy on top of us.I also don't get the point why they need to hide those useful info.