Friday, 17, Oct 2008 08:14
An insight into why quality scores are used in search ad auctions has been offered by Google.
In a post on the company's Official Google Blog, chief economist at the firm Hal Varian explains when a user types a query into a search engine, it will normally return both natural search results and advertisements.
He notes that Google - and many other major search engines - make use of an ad auction in order to determine which adverts are shown and how much marketers pay for them.
In the auctions, advertisers enter a bid which shows how much they are willing to pay for a click on their advert - their maximum cost per click - and ads are then ordered by the product of their bid which is entered and the ad's estimated quality score.
Mr Varian concludes: "So why are quality scores important? Answer: they lead to a better auction by allowing advertisers to buy clicks, publishers to sell impressions and users to see relevant ads."
In other news, the search engine company recently announced the launch of a new tool to help webmasters deal with broken weblinks.