Yahoo has implemented a cool music listening feature as a result of their partnership with Rhapsody. Now users will be able to do all the same things they could before like viewing artist photos and videos, or viewing song tracks and official website, with the added bonus of listening to full versions of tracks up to 30 a month as opposed to the sample that users where once limited to. The tracks will play in the new Yahoo Foxy Player and you can do all of this without ever leaving the search results page or logging in! Google has also announced in a Google Labs project that they are indexing audio content. Imagine being able to search for a phrase and limit the results to audio or video files. Could be pretty interesting. This may even lead to new forms of marketing and advertising in files, or for the search giants themselves as pre roll ads for the service they are providing.

The Google quality score has recently undergone some changes to make it more accurate and provide users with higher quality advertisers. Google is introducing some changes in the coming days and you should notice a few things different in your adwords account. One of the changes is that quality score will now be measured at the moment of each search query. You will also notice that the keywords are no longer marked inactive for search and your minimum bid will disappear and be replaced with first page bid.

So what does all this mean for you? Well it will allow for a dynamic landing page quality score instead of a static one. This will hopefully allow domainers to make improvements to their sites and bring down some of those 10.00 minimum bids to a more reasonable price. This should also allow your ad’s to show when most relevant and increase conversions.

First page will replace minimum bids. This will give an idea of how much you have to bid to show in a placement again. For a while it was completely unknown. At least now you know that you can bid x amount and show up on the first page of search results. This is based on the “exact match” keyword, ad quality score, and competition on that keyword.

No more inactive for search! This is cool because due to the new quality score we can now have the opportunity to serve up in more highly converting places and not show in less optimal spots. This is a huge improvement over judging the ad quality one time and scoring it as a static score for all websites and search queries you may be bidding on. This could help some advertisers gain a little more volume, however if you had an abundance of inactive for search you may find that they don’t get a lot of traffic after the changes either. I recommend going through and cleaning up your keywords for underperforming ones and place emphasis on less keywords that are very targeted. Structure your ad groups so they make sense and all keywords within the ad group are related to each other. In addition to this remove keywords that have not had at least 100 impressions for the month. These will drag your ad quality score down. These should be positive changes for everyone the publishers, the advertisers, and the users.