Myths in contextual advertising: does account quality affect the cost of a click?

Every week, the online edition SEOnews and the online advertising automation service eLama help to understand the nuances of contextual advertising within the framework of the special project “Myths in contextual advertising”.

Earlier, we have already found out whether it is necessary to start launching advertising with Search and whether it is always necessary to separate campaigns on Search and in Networks. Today Nikita Kravchenko, Leading Paid Traffic Specialist at eLama, will tell you if account quality affects CPC and what to do if account quality is low.

Watch the video. You will find a text transcript under the video.

Myth: Account Quality (Optimization Score) Affects CPC

Many people believe that the quality of the account directly affects the cost per click. In fact, this is not the case.

You can see the quality of your Yandex.Direct account in the section containing the name or ID of the advertising account. When you click on the name, a numerical value will be shown that characterizes the quality of the account.

Very often, advertisers look at this value and think that if the indicator is less than ten, the cost per click will be overestimated, they will have to pay more than their competitors are paying, and something urgently needs to be done.

Google Ads also has an account quality called an optimization score. If you go to the “Recommendations”, then you can see this optimization indicator, the maximum value of which reaches 100%.

In the same section, you can see in a tabular version the breakdown by optimization indicator for different advertising campaigns, sort from smallest to largest, and see where the advertiser, according to Google, has some errors.

Neither the Yandex.Direct account quality score nor the account or campaign optimization score in Google Ads directly affects the cost per click.

Indirectly, account quality and optimization score can affect ad performance.

The optimization score is based on some very important elements that can be seen in the recommendations.

How to work with quality

• It is necessary to monitor the quality indicator and recommendations that are shown inside the interfaces of advertising systems.
• Various hypotheses should be tested based on recommendations.
• If a recommendation appears in Google Ads that is definitely not needed (for example, inappropriate keywords), you can reject it. This trains the algorithms, allows you to better optimize advertising campaigns in the future, especially when using automatic strategies.

Don t be afraid of a low Account Quality Score or a low Optimization Score. You need to study the recommendations and follow those that fit.

When you see a low Quality Score, you don t have to think that everything is poorly configured. Perhaps Yandex is simply trying to motivate to launch additional types of campaigns: advertising in the Networks, smart banners or retargeting.

Outcome

Advertisers don t pay more if their Account Quality Score and Optimization Score are low. But in general, these are useful functions that are worth looking at and on the basis of which you can form hypotheses for experiments.

That s all. In a week, another video is waiting for you, in which we will analyze whether the audience is clarified by different targeting in YAN.