How Can You Check Your Landing Page Quality In Yahoo Search Campaigns?

Trick question. You can’t.

Yahoo doesn’t review your landing page to compute your quality score for PPC campaigns like Google does.  Yes, they have quality score, and they monitor your ads for breaches of policy, and yes click-through rate matters to your quality score on Yahoo, too, but nope, they don’t look at your landing page.  They consider that the realm of conversions, and your business.

This doesn’t mean you can get away with murder. Ethical advertising still matters to Yahoo. In fact, Yahoo has been upping their ad policy review standards and exerting tighter control over what you can advertise in your ads.  But if your ad passes their policy review, you won’t find the same limitations as you do with AdWords spiders of your landing pages.

(Instead of worrying about landing page quality score, on Yahoo consider keyword insertion, as they place value on that in ad copy when determining quality score.)

In a search advertising world where Google is tightening their standards in regards to advertising landing pages, Yahoo’s quality score algorithm may be a breath of fresh air for sites that don’t pass muster in AdWords, but still do in fact offer a product or service of value.  For instance, as Google has taken an increasingly negative view of “review” sites (which are often affiliate sites), those sites may likely still see significant traffic on the Yahoo search platform.

Although there still needs to be a Department of Justice review on the Microsoft / Yahoo search agreement, if that goes through and these policies remain in effect there’s even more reason to think this could be a worthwhile avenue to pursue for some estranged AdWords advertisers, even if the combined marketshare willl remain dwarfed by Google.

by Rob Sieracki

Director of Paid Search