Today Yahoo announced thier new ranking model for the UK market. Now it’s time for our brother Brit’s to worry about thier ads quality index in Yahoo.  Highly optimized ads that target the search environments query and also include those query keywords in the ad text and within highly segmented ad groups will gain a higher quality index.

Yahoo’s Overview of Quality Index

The quality index is a relative measure of your ad’s performance.

• The quality index takes into account the click-through rate and other relevance factors.
• It tells you how well your ad is performing, on average, for all keywords in an ad group for which it is displayed.
• It reflects your ad’s ability to meet the needs of users by looking at your click-through rate, as well as other relevance factors.

How The Yahoo Quality Index Works.

1. Each ad has quality index displayed as one to five bars (1 = poor and 5 = good).
2. When you create a new ad, your quality index score is based on various relevance factors.
3. As impressions and clicks accumulate, your click-through rate becomes the primary factor in calculating your quality index score.

Example of a good quality index score (5 bars):

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Example of a low quality index score (1 bar):

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Your Yahoo ad’s quality is determined by:

• The ad’s historical performance-determined by its click-through rate relative to its position on the page.
• The ad’s expected performance, relative to competing ads displayed at the same time-determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo! Search Marketing’s ranking algorithms.

Yahoo Strategies for gaining a higher quality ad index

1. Include keywords in your ad (use our Insert Keyword feature).
2. Choose keywords for each ad group carefully.
3. Use ad testing.
4. Use our Excluded Keyword feature to optimize your advanced match type.
5. Review your current bids and set a campaign budget to meet your business goals.