Searchyogi

Google has announced changes to its ad scoring algorithm. The changes are two fold:

Until now, the algo assigned a higher rating to ads that have higher Click Through Rate (CTR), independent of ad position. This decoupling meant that higher position ads got higher ratings, since they were more “visible” to users and hence got higher CTRs. Google is taking care of this anomaly by coupling these two parameters.

The other change relates to giving a much higher emphasis to the quality score at the expense of Ad rank for ads that sit above the organic search results (NOT on the right hand column). For keyword targeted search ads:

Ad Rank = CPC bid × Quality Score

Google now will promote high quality score ads to the area above the organic results even though they have a lower Ad rank i.e. their CPC is not as high as the others.

These changes will have an impact on user experience, and possibly a consequent positive effect on the monetization. Kudos to Google for keeping user experience high on their list.

Linkedin today announced that they are allowing users to add applications to their profiles. This is a move a-la facebook and Orkut. I would expect a significant increase in traffic (Page views) for Linkedin with users now logging in to see the new blog post or slide presentations of their friends. Linkedin has the following integrations in place now:

• Blogs: Wordpress and SixApart.
• Box.net for sharing files
• Tripit to see where the people in your network are travelling.
• Google docs and slideshare integration for embedding, sharing and commenting on slide presentations.

I am sure this will aid their monetization efforts significantly. Excellent move Linkedin!

The Adwords editor is one of the most useful Ad applications that Google has come up with in recent days. From a search advertiser’s stand point, it gives a great deal of flexibility in making large scale changes relatively quickly. The tool is specially useful when dealing with complex accounts where keyword characteristics tend to be multi dimensional in nature.

This is one more place where yahoo has not been able to deliver. Search ad spend tends to be correlated to the ease with which changes can be made to campaigns. It is to be seen how Yahoo V2/ Panama will affect the search ad spend share of google and yahoo. V2 is likely to put Yahoo on par with Google in relation to the main Adwords application. Most likely the average ad spend per advertiser is likely to increase in Yahoo because of V2. However, I do not see Yahoo coming up with an Adwords Editor like application at least until August 2007.