Quality Score affecting when ads are shown in the yellow box

I’ve been in the UK for 3 weeks and fully intended blogging during that period but it didn’t happen. Anyway, I’m back on board now and will make up for it.

I’ll ease in gradually with a report on a great article by Gord Hortchkiss that was published in searchnewz.com. It’s a transcript of his interview with Nick Fox and Diane Chang from Google’s Ad Quality team. The subject is the adWords quality scoring and it’s a long read (well worth it though) so here are my highlights:

The bulk of the interview centres around the positioning of sponsored links at the top of the left hand side of the page above the organic listings. This is a very desirable position. Scanning studies have shown that the top of the left hand side is in the primary scanning path of the user. The links at the top of the left hand side are viewed more frequently than links on the right hand side.

Not all searches result in the display of ads in this top left hand corner. Often there are only sponsored links on the right hand side and there hasn’t been much information on the criteria for when ads are shown in the yellow box and when they are not.

The interview clarifies this to some degree in that the broad criteria is outlined

• Only high quality ads are placed at the top so the quality score has to be high
• The auction order is never broken (if someone bids a high enough price with a low quality score and their ad rank is number one, then the ad will be shown at the top but on the right hand side
• The maturity of the market plays a part and ads will be shown less frequently at the top in immature markets (China was used as an example of an immature market, US and UK as mature markets).

Here’s the interview transcript.