[LINK] Net Ad quality

[Jon Seymour]

Wouldn't it be nice if they used this monopoly power in a similar way
to encourage adoption of xhtml strict and other forms of standards
compliance (e.g. accessibility, etc) ?

jon.

On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 4:24 AM,  <stephen at melbpc.org.au> wrote:
> Google: "We'd like to think that we had a hand in the webs shift
>         to a "content meritocracy"."
>
> http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2008/05/intro-to-ad-quality-test-
> challenges.html
>
>
> WebProNews: Tuesday, May 27, 2008. http://www.webpronews.com/feeds
>
> Ad quality becomes a bigger issue in the coming weeks, as Google plans to
> subject advertisers to landing page load time assessments. Speedier pages,
> which will mean those without lots of plugged-in third-party content, will
> receive better ad quality scores.
>
> Google's strategy considers quality as king of the advertising and visitor
> relationship. Relevant search results are no longer enough; it might be
> suggested that certain competing search engines would suit people as well
> as Google does for queries.
>
> Better ad destinations make the organic search results look that much more
> valuable. Google's strategic shift from quantity to quality ads over the
> past few months means they believe the company makes more money from a
> single well-conforming ad than several less-pertinent ones. Google isn't
> about to leave money on the table, and neither should its clients.
>
> Wealthy businesses and smaller operations all compete fairly when it comes
> to testing ad quality, and thus a placement at the top isn't a divine
> right for anyone.
>
> The issue of ad quality appeared in a post at Google's Testing blog. (url
> above). Alex Icev wrote about the team and process involved with ranking
> the quality of search results, and how that transitioned into work on the
> advertising side.
>
> "We needed to change a system that was predominately driven by human
> influence into one that (built) its merit based on feedback from the
> community," Icev said. He detailed a little of the process behind this,
> especially in the context of moving poor performers out of view:
>
> The idea was that we would penalize the ranking of paid ads in several
> circumstances: few users were clicking on a particular ads, an ad's
> landing page was not relevant, or if users don't like an ad's content.
>
> We want to provide our users with absolutely the most relevant ads for
> their click.
>
> Even though the big change to scoring ads based on concepts like landing
> page speed hits everyone, we think the bigger spenders have an advantage,
> and always will have, when it comes to bidding for certain lucrative
> keywords.
>
> The most competitive keywords spur advertisers to improve their all-around
> page quality. When all other factors are equal, the bid spend makes the
> difference. Advertisers spend more, and Google profits. With luck, the
> visiting ad-clicker benefits the most.
>
> About the Author: David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering
> technology and business. Follow me on Twitter, and you can reach me via
> email at dutter @ webpronews dot com.
> --
>
> Cheers people
> Stephen Loosley
> Victoria, Australia
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