When Pay-Per-Click advertising first came about it, there wasn’t much thought that went into the creation of campaigns. It took a few years for marketers to realize the capabilities of Pay-Per-Click advertising. On the same note, it took the Google Adwords and Overtures’ (now Yahoo Search Marketing) of the world a few years to fully capitalize on the applications they had created. Over the years we have seen vast changes to these applications with three themes in common.

Every change made by Pay-Per-Click advertising companies have concentrated on the following themes:

1. Make a better user experience - always a top priority of the search engine companies. I mean brand loyalty is key for any successful business.

2. Make money - Take a look at how much one share of the Google stock goes for: http://finance.google.com/finance?q=GOOG - Do I need to say anymore?

3. Make it easier for search engine marketers to navigate and use the applications - the easier the search engine companies make it for businesses to advertise online, the more attractive of an option it looks compared to traditional forms of marketing.

When the Pay-Per-Click advertising companies recently decided to make quality score a large part of the algorithm for when to display which ads; most search engine marketers were not surprised. In the past it was easy to come up first in the search engine result pages - all you had to do was be willing to outbid your competitors for that top spot in the sponsored results. Pay-Per-Click programs used to be based on the traditional auction system. If you were willing to pay $1.00 for a click on a specific keyword search and I was willing to bid $1.25 per click on the same keyword search - my advertisement would show higher than yours on the search engine result page. It was a simple system that worked for a few years but as with any new service offering there were improvements that could be made.

In the last year we have seen both Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing shift their traditional auction system model to a more strategic approach; including quality score as a key factor as to which advertisement to show at top of the sponsored search results.

What is Quality Score?

“Quality Score is the basis for measuring the quality and relevance of your ads and determining your minimum CPC bid for Google and the search network. This score is determined by your keyword’s clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, and the relevance of your ad text, keyword, and landing page.

We believe high quality ads attract more clicks, encourage user trust, and result in better long-term performance. To encourage relevant and successful ads within AdWords, our system defines a Quality Score to set your keyword status, minimum CPC bid, and ad rank for the ad auction.”  Source:http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=21388

The effects of quality score on pay-per-click advertising have increased the responsibility of search engine marketers to make each and every ad as relevant as possible. The old school approach of bidding the maximum amount on every keyword in your market space and using one generic ad copy for all the search results is no more. Search engine marketers still have to bid on keywords and subsequently be willing to spend a pretty penny on clicks but now the user is more likely to click a sponsored result that will convert them to a customer or help them find the information they were seeking.

The addition of quality score to pay-per-click advertising is a win-win situation for all parties involved.

Users: Get the most relevant ads served for specific search queries and in return they are more likely to convert to customers.

Search engine companies: Keep brand loyalty by delivering the result the user was searching for. The addition of quality score also improves conversion rates for websites advertising online and in return business owners are willing to spend more money on online advertising.

Businesses/Websites: Conversion rates go up! This means you make more money for every dollar you spend. Isn’t the goal of any marketing initiative to obtain a high ROI? 

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is a form of search engine marketing that allows you to place advertisements on specific search engine result pages. Search engines have emerged to become the largest platforms for direct-to-consumer marketing as pay-per-click adverting requires you to pay every time a search engine user clicks on the advertisement you have positioned in the search engine result pages. The more money you are willing to allocate per click will ultimately determine the position of your result among the plethora of sites on the internet. The messaging of your pay-per-click advertisement is important in succeeding to drive the most qualified web visitors to your website.

According to Jupiter Media, by the year 2010, search engine marketers will spend over 16 billion dollars a year on pay-per-click advertising. This trend suggests that pay-per-click advertising will become increasingly more competitive and more expensive as more sites shift their advertising to pay-per-click. Hence, it is crucial to have a pay-per-click management strategy you are confident will return the successful results you deserve.