eBrandz Blog

Understanding differences between adCenter & Adwords and a new Quality Score feature

Perhaps you are a medium or small sized business owner who has been spending a considerable amount of time and energy meticulously planning out your Google PPC account. You understand the important role it plays for your promising and fast emerging business on the Web. It is quite understandable that you don’t have the inclination to repeat the whole exercise and perform it all over again for some other search engine.

It may be that you are a busy search agency with several accounts to set up before the much talked about alliance between Yahoo! and Microsoft Search takes off later this year. Either way, it is understandable that you wish to save yourself from climbing the same mountain more than once.

Google Adsheet Import Tool

If that is the case, you may try out Google Adsheet Import Tool from Microsoft Advertising. It is said to be quite handy. Included with the free adCenter Desktop tool, you can download it for your benefit. If you haven’t done it so far, here is a brief guide to the process, which is actually fairly simple.

Step 1 is to export your Google account utilizing Google Adwords Editor Tool, which is there in the form of a CSV file. Step 2 is to import the particular file utilizing your adCenter Desktop Tool.

When some of you will click on the link and arrive at the page, at the first of glance of it, they might think, “It cannot be that easy!” Well, to an extent, you’re right. It’s indeed not! First, if you happen to import it improperly you may lose a considerable proportion of your deep links.

Next, there are certain fundamental differences that exist between adCenter and Adwords, which can make your accounts quite ineffective if you fail to address them. What you need is a correct approach so as to successfully convert your accounts, and follow the right practices, mapping subtle differences between both adCenter & Adwords accounts.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has announced rollout of a new Quality Score feature within adCenter to give advertisers feedback on their keyword/s performance – somewhat similar to Google’s Quality Score. According to Microsoft, scores won’t directly influence the way ads get ranked, but rather reflect how well they are doing in the marketplace.

Finer aspects of new Quality Score feature

As is known, Google employs the quality score for determining cost-per-click and ranking.
Microsoft’s Quality Score will display one number (1 through 10 – for each match type) at the respective keyword level. Advertisers can check sub-scores for working out landing page relevance, landing page user experience, and keyword relevance – a measure of how pertinent advertiser’s key term is, compared to others opting for the same key term.

It will indicate three possible scores, whereas relevance and user experience of a landing page will suggest how relevant it’s to the query, and whether it can meet relevance as well as quality guidelines. Besides considering the above metrics, Google also makes use of historical click-through rate for the key term and the account as a whole. It considers the keyword’s relevance to the ads and geographic performance apart from other non-specified ‘relevance factors’.