MSN QBR - Quality-Based Ranking for AdCenter

If you've never submitted a PPC campaign to MSN, get ready for some real scrutiny of your landing pages... A campaign that was successfully launched with Google and Yahoo got this response from MSN editors:

Here some information regarding QBR and landing page best practices. From here, we need to rework your landing page to clean it up a bit. Then I'll appeal the QBR status. Hope this helps.

Here are a few suggestions to consider to begin with that may help to improve your landing page quality based ranking:

* Reducing some of your font sizes on your landing pages.
* Provide more information above the fold (what customers see first when coming to your sites) by perhaps using more of the left nav, top or right nav areas, rather than have to scroll down for much of the content.
* Using specific destination URLs to bring customers to the final desired location, rather than have customers come to the site and have to click additional links to get to the desired location.
* Consider moving your paid ads away from the top of your site.
* Other. See resources below.


Later, as appropriate changes are made to your sites, we can try to submit an appeal to have your landing page quality based ranking reviewed and hopefully re-evaluated, thus helping to improve delivery. Here are some resources.

* Ad Ranking Best Practices: http://advertising.microsoft.com/advertising-case-studies?Adv_ResearchReportID=2
* Editorial Best Practices: http://advertising.microsoft.com/editorial-best-practices
* Site Construction: http://advertising.microsoft.com/Home/Article.aspx?pageid=708&Adv_Articleid=3213
* Blog on Quality Based Ranking: http://adcenterblog.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!85E824269AB8C30D!352.entry

Also included this for further contemplation:

How is ranking determined?
Ranking is based on a combination of bid price and relevance.

· The more relevant the ad and landing page to the user's likely intent and the better experience from a search query to ad to landing page, the greater the probability of receiving traffic and ranking higher.

· Greater relevance mitigates higher competitive bids.

· Higher rank increases the opportunity to convert searchers into customers.

Why did my ranking change and/or traffic drop?
We are continually testing improvements in how we determine relevance, the aim of which is to ensure the highest quality ads are provided to our users. These improvements check the quality of keywords, ads and landing pages from advertisers. The more relevant your ads, keywords and landing pages are to the user's likely intent, the more likely your ad will be displayed.


What can I do to improve ad ranking or increase traffic?
Continue to improve your ad & landing page quality. Use very targeted and specific landing pages. Create & use landing pages that show high value to specific search intent. Avoid large generic campaigns with unclear value to advertiser. Work to provide substantial, specific content targeted to the user intent and of real value to the user searching on the keyword.


I'm seeing drops in rank/traffic on my site, but not my competitors… why?
Advertisers will experience differing levels of impact due to varied content types and a number of other quality factors. We evaluate all advertisers with the same criteria that will bring the best user experience to our searchers.

It's clear you are focusing on shopping aggregators and arbitrage sites… why? One of the quality check improvements we are making is to ensure the user experience from query to ad to landing page is the best it can be. Finding the content a searcher is seeking on the landing page, without extra clicks, can be part of the criteria we use to evaluate that experience.

My advertiser is on this list and will essentially be out of business due to these improvements. What do I tell them? Microsoft is constantly working to improve the search experience for our consumers. This includes focusing on the ad and landing page quality and overall experience of a search result based on the user's likely intent. We understand that your account has seen a significant decrease in traffic. We apologize for this inconvenience and suggest you look to improve your landing pages by referring to Editorial Best Practices and Ad Ranking Best Practices.

How do you choose which customers are affected by QBR? Is it manual or an algorithm? We use a variety of methods to determine ads and landing pages that are of high quality and that result in a good experience for the searcher. Most of the methods we use are automated, but are constantly augmented, tested and checked using human and statistical verification.

Each search engine has their own algorithm for quality score of landing pages. Seems MSN is especially picky -- and definitely uses human editors to look over your pages. We'll see how long they continue to be this hand-to-hand.

-j