I have spent the past work day researching and refreshing my memory in regards to PPC advertising with Google, as well as learning the ways of PPC bidding in MSN and Yahoo.

Though ad ranking with Google ad words may be common knowledge for some people, I didn’t know how the ads ranked before this year when I read all about Google ad ranking. Any webmaster who is planning on advertising their site should know this information. The thing that I found most surprising is that the cost per click is only one factor in determining where the ad ranks, not the only factor as I had previously thought. I had always thought that whoever bid the most would be ranked the highest. Untrue!

Besides maximum price per click, the other factor is quality score which is multiplied to the maximum cost per click. The factors that play a part in the quality score are the click-through rate of the advertisers’ ads, the relevance of the ad and the keywords associated with the ad compared to the term that was searched within Google, and the historical performance of the keyword. The person with the highest quality score multiplied to the maximum cost per click is the person or company ranked number 1 in the ad rankings. There is more to the actual ranking, which I hope to discuss in the coming days.