Archive for April, 2007

New Ad Testing Tutorial

Is this thing on?

That’s one of the things a comedian says when he or she’s got a tough crowd and isn’t getting any laughs, along with “These are the jokes, people, “Is this a nightclub or a rest home?” “Is this an audience or an oil painting?” and, as the late, great Rodney Dangerfield used to say, “Come on, try to keep up! Let’s keep this thing moving!”
 
Ad Testing may be no laughing matter. But it is, in fact, always on unless you turn it off yourself, in case you didn’t know. We’ve written about our Ad Testing feature before, offering up tips on how to make the best use of it. In addition to our previous post and the useful material in the Help section, we offer a new interactive Ad Testing tutorial.

So let’s keep this thing moving and use Ad Testing to its max. We won’t promise you laughs, but you might see a higher CTR, and maybe even a little respect.

—Michael Mattis

Short Descriptions Coming

Modify Your Ads Now

As a frequent blog reader, you’ve probably already read that, come May, we will be requiring short descriptions (70 character or fewer) on all new or modified ads, whereas before this was merely an option. We’re doing this (to quote myself) because “we’ve found that ads written more concisely give users a better experience and perform better for advertisers. When users are exposed to higher quality search ads you, the advertiser, may attract more interested and enthusiastic potential customers.”

This is a little reminder on how you can modify your ads and add short descriptions. The basic procedure is:

• Log into your account
• Click the Campaigns tab
• Click on a campaign containing the ad(s) you wish to modify
• Select the specific ad group containing the ad(s) you wish to modify
• Click on the Ads tab
• Click on the name of the ad you wish to modify
• Write a short description in the box indicated on the “Create Your Ad” page
• Click “Save Changes”

Short (Description) Cuts
There is also an “edit” button in the Most Displayed Ad box on the Ad Group page, Clicking it will take you directly to that ad’s Create Your Ad page, where you may add a short description and make any other modifications you desire.

You can get to the ads in your top ad groups from your Dashboard by selecting “Top Ad Groups” from the drop-down menu above the bottom box, selecting an ad group and then clicking on the Ads tab.

—Michael Mattis

No-Cost Campaign Design

How to Move and Copy Ad Groups within Your Campaigns

I don’t know about you, but I am a huge fan of do-it-yourself home design shows. My favorites are those that demonstrate how moving a few pieces of furniture can change the whole look of a room without spending any money.

It’s hard to believe that an area rug from a dining room and a few pieces of wall art from a bedroom can transform a living room into the perfect gathering place, but these no-cost design shows produce dramatic transformations each and every time.

Similarly, you can make improvements in your account by doing your own “Spring cleaning:” moving ad groups from one campaign to another. You may want to move ad groups when your campaigns become too large for easy management, or when you want to add certain ad groups to a newly created campaign.

Moving an Ad Group to a Different Campaign
Transferring approved and pending keywords and ads to a new or different campaign is simple and quick if you follow these steps:

1. Click the Campaigns tab.
2. Click on the name of the campaign that contains the ad group that you want to move.
3. Click on the name of the ad group you want to move.
4. Click the down arrow to the right of the Ad Group Settings button.
5. Select “Move.”
6. You can make changes to these parameters:
• Assign to Campaign – Select an existing campaign to which to assign your ad group.
• Excluded Words – You can add excluded words to apply to your ad group.
  Click the “Save Changes” button. 

Copying an Ad Group to a Different Campaign
You also have the option to duplicate ad groups and assign them to other campaigns—without moving them from their original location—by following these steps:

1. Click the Campaigns tab.
2. Click on the name of the campaign that contains the ad group that you want to copy.
3. Click on the name of the ad group you want to copy.
4. Click the down arrow to the right of the Ad Group Settings button.
5. Select “Copy.”
6. You can make changes to these parameters:
• New Ad Group Name—Create a new name for the ad group you are creating. Ad group names must be unique within a campaign. If you copy an ad group to the same campaign, you must choose a new name for the ad group.
• Assign to Campaign—Select an existing campaign to which to assign your ad group.
• Ad Group Status—You can turn the status of your ad group on or off.
• Watch List—You can add or remove the ad group from your Watch List.
• Distribution Tactic—You can change Sponsored Search and Content Match distribution tactics for your ad group.
• Match Type—You can select the Standard or Advanced match type for your ad group.
• Excluded Words—You can add excluded words to apply to your ad group.
• Optimize Ad Display—Select “Yes” to ensure that the ads that have higher click-through rates are displayed more frequently, or select “No” to equally display each ad in the ad group.

7. Click the “Save Changes” button.

Remember that ad groups can be moved whether their status is “on” or “off.” When you move ad groups, their status does not change, nor does the status of the ad group’s keywords and ads.

If your mop and dust-rag are at the ready, it’s time to start your Spring cleaning!

—Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo! Search Marketing Writer

Yahoo! at ad:tech SF, 2007

Panelists help illuminate interactive issues

San Francisco, a city nestled between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, is renowned for its cable cars and eclectic mix of Victorian and modern architecture that dots the landscape of its rolling hills. There’s also the majestic Golden Gate Bridge, which often appears to be holding up the city’s world-famous chilly fog.

Residents of “The City” are probably too familiar with its micro-climates, cold summers and large online technology sector. If you’re heading to San Francisco this week, you’re probably there to attend ad:tech SF 2007, to be held Tuesday, April 24 to Thursday, April 26 at the Moscone Convention Center.

Yahoo! will be at ad:tech SF 2007, and we invite you to check out some of our great panelists to hear the latest on interactive marketing.

Tuesday, April 24
The Path to One-to-One Marketing: The Evolution of Behavioral Targeting
Join experts as they talk about the emerging trends, latest analytics and tools to help you effectively reach your customers through behavioral targeting.
Yahoo! Speaker: Richard Frankel, Senior Director of Product Marketing

Wednesday April 25
Vertical Focus: Financial Services Online
Find out how leading online and traditional financial institutions, and leading media companies in this vertical, are using digital platforms to compliment above-the-line campaigns to drive both customer acquisition and brand preference.
Yahoo! Speaker: Justin Merickel, Director of Finance Category

Mobile Advertising: Fact or Fiction?
This panel explores the myths and realities of leveraging the mobile channel for advertising purposes, and what marketers have been doing to advertise through the mobile channel.
Yahoo! Speaker: Michael Bayle, GM of Monetization Connected Life

Thursday, April 26
Market Focus: U.S. Hispanics Online
In this panel, experts engaged in the U.S. Hispanic market will discuss marketing trends, the role of new media and technologies, search engine strategies and best practices when targeting Hispanics online.
Yahoo! Speaker: Jose Rivera-Font, General Manager, Yahoo! North Latin America

New Media Universe, New Consumer Behavior
The new media landscape is constantly changing and evolving. Audiences are also changing their media consumption patterns, and marketers need to catch up. This session explores just what consumers are doing with media, how their attitudes about advertising are changing, and how the industry needs to change.
Yahoo! Speaker: Anne Frisbie, VP, Category and Sales Intelligence

Tactical Search: Local and Mobile Search Strategies
Local marketing strategies are effective and have widespread application, yet many marketers have yet to gain a solid understanding of the marketplace. And how does mobile fit into this equation? This session explores best practices for reaching out to consumers using local marketing tactics with Internet and mobile platforms.
Yahoo! Speaker: Warren Kay, Director of Emerging Products

Whether you’re an expert on behavioral targeting or in the fog about mobile marketing and emerging platforms, Yahoo! is here to help and hopefully serve as an industry beacon to beam some light on your search marketing shores.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

Upgrades and Enhancements

New Keyword Bidding page, Editorial Status Download and an Entirely New Report

It’s a busy time here at Yahoo! Search Marketing. Last week, we announced our new Technology Solutions Center, where you can apply for our API access. Today, we have a veritable cornucopia of new releases for you to explore.

New Keyword Bidding and Ad Preview Page
First up, we’ve updated your keyword details page and the keyword bidding tool. The old screen looked like this:

Your new keyword bidding tool looks like this:

We’ve made this change to make the bidding tool easier to use in response to your feedback. Look for more details here in the coming weeks on how best to take advantage of this enhancement. In the meantime, play around with the forecasting tools; we think you’ll get the feel of it in pretty short order. Also, the Keyword Details page now reflects edits related to alternate text on the fly.

This new screen is designed help you work with the new 70-character limit for short descriptions (which includes punctuation and spaces). If you go over the 70-character limit, the system will automatically revert to the previously saved text.

Editorial Status Spreadsheet
Those of you who have had multiple keywords in editorial limbo know that it could be a pain to have to go through each one individual page to check their status. We now offer a way to download these in bulk in a single spreadsheet.  You can download from the editorial status page. Navigate to the Campaigns tab and click the “Editorial Status” link. The download link is on the top right hand side, marked “Download Keywords and Ads”.

New Ad-Level Reporting
Some advertisers can get fixated on keywords, but we’ve found that the quality of an ad—its “clickability”—tends to be more important in generating qualified leads. To help you generate higher quality ads, we’ve created a whole new report that shows how your ads are performing in terms of conversion rate. Just select Ad Performance under the Reports tab.

Look for lots more updates and enhancements coming your way in the near future.

 —Michael Mattis

Faster, Simplified Online Customer Checkout

Yahoo! PayPal Checkout Program Launches 

Imagine a customer in a busy store, perhaps a grocery store. They walk in to find one or two items, a store worker points them to the product they want. As they head for the check out counter, one opens up just for them. They hand over the product, swipe a card and are on their way. What a great experience!

Imagine offering that same shopping experience to your customers online. Now you can, with the newly launched Yahoo! PayPal Checkout program that enables a streamlined purchase process for the over 130 million PayPal customers on the Internet.

Here is how it works: When a user goes to Yahoo! Search to find an item or service, the results page may include Yahoo! Sponsored Search results matched to the user’s query. If the merchant has joined the Yahoo! PayPal Checkout program, a blue shopping cart icon will appear next to the merchant’s name in the Sponsored Search results. By clicking on the ad, users will have direct access to a safe, secure purchasing process that does not require any additional credit card information and can be completed in just a few mouse clicks.

As an advertiser, this is great news for you. The blue shopping cart icon that will appear next to your ad not only helps the ad stand out, it also lets customers know which merchants offer PayPal Express Checkout, from the brand known for security.

As a merchant, you want the online shopping and buying process to go smoothly and quickly, and connecting Yahoo! Search Marketing with PayPal Express Checkout accomplishes that.

Yahoo! and PayPal are launching this new program with a series of special offers for merchants and since there is no cost to join, it’s definitely worth checking out (pun intended).

— Rich Riley, Sr. Vice President, Online Channel & Small Business Services, Yahoo!

Punctilious Punctuation

When Adding up Characters in Your Ad Descriptions, Spaces and Punctuation Count

Last week, you may recall, we announced that short descriptions for your ads (70 characters or fewer) will be required starting in May, while long descriptions (up to 190 characters), will be optional. To reiterate, we will begin “truncating,” or cutting off, descriptions at the nearest complete word to 70 characters, followed by an ellipsis (”…”), in Yahoo! Sponsored Search results starting in June.

When we made this announcement, one savvy blog reader, Bob, asked: “Regarding the number of characters, do spaces between words count as characters?” 

The short answer is: “Yes, Bob.”

Spaces, as well as periods, question marks, colons, semi-colons, ampersands, exclamation points, quotes (including “scare quotes”), commas, apostrophes, dashes, dollar signs, brackets, asterisks and all other symbols and forms of punctuation count as characters, except for the ellipsis mentioned above.

If your short description goes longer than 70 characters come mid-June, it will be trunacated (at the nearest complete word, mind you) but our system will add the ellipsis after that word. Should you, on the other hand, add an ellipsis on your own, for whatever reason, that will count as three characters.

We all know what punctuation looks like —”!, ?, :, $,” etc.—but it takes a humorist of considerable talent to tell us what it sounds like. The late Danish comedian and classical pianist, Victor Borge came up with a system of phonetic punctuation, a routine for which he became world famous.

—Michael Mattis
 

Two-point-oh

Or, how I learned stop worrying and love the future at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, April 15 to 18

I’m pretty much a sucker for anything with “two-point-oh” (”2.0″) in the title. At this point it’s almost embarrassing. It comes from the fact that I was once on staff at the trendy business news magazine, “Business 2.0,” where we embraced (and pimped) the so-called New Economy and made up all sort of new rules to go with it. It was 2.0 tons of fun.

The New Economy didn’t quite pan out the way our little cabal of idealists had envisioned, but there’s still a lot to it. Take this whole Web 2.0 thing. Some say that Web 2.0 is to the Internet what string theory is to physics—a pretty theory that can’t be proven in practice. I ought to be jaded about it, but actually I’m pretty jazzed.

Web 2.0, to borrow lingo from the fellow who first coined the term, “is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”

Yep, that’s a nice sounding theory all right. But in practice it means enabling users to do their thing—create new content and communities of interest through wikis, blogging, social bookmarking, v-casting and the whole plethora of social media—while learning to make a buck or two off of it where you can. It’s not unlike selling picks and shovels to gold miners. Got a problem with that? Then move back to the Soviet Union, pal.

Anyway, this is a round-about way to get you excited about next week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, where you’ll be able to learn some of the tricks of the Web 2.0 trade from some of the best 2.0 minds. This is not your ordinary theory conference, but a get-your-hands dirty, networking-heavy, learning confab-gabfest designed to show you where the Web is going and, possibly, where the money is going, too. Highlights and Yahoo! appearances include: 

Sunday

• High Performance Webpages (Workshop) with Steve Souders (Yahoo!)
  Tenni Theurer (Yahoo!)

Monday

• The People Formerly Known as the Audience with Heather Champ (Flickr) and Derek Powazek (Blogger, Technorati)
• Media 2.0: How Web 2.0 is Transforming Traditional Media with Charlene Li (Forrester Research), Gabe Rivera (TechMeme), Ted Shelton (The Personal Bee)—who I went to high school with—and Rich Skrenta (Topix)
• Local Search Marketing: Let’s Get Small with LeeAnn Prescott (Hitwise)
  Jennifer Black (Local.com), Perry Evans (Local Matters),  Kendall Fargo (Intuit) and
  Frazier Miller (Yahoo! Local)

Tuesday

• Building Awesome Web Sites & Services Using the Power of Happy Users with Ted Rheingold (Dogster), Stewart Butterfield (Flickr), Joshua Schachter (Yahoo!),  Biz Stone (Obvious)
• Social Networking Winners & Losers: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly with Charlene Li (Forrester), Gina Bianchini (Ning), Matt Cohler (Facebook), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Mike Speiser (Yahoo!)

Wednesday

• Jeff Weiner in Conversation with John Battelle with (surprise) Jeff Weiner (Yahoo!) and John Battelle (Program Chair, Web 2.0 Conference; Federated Media Publishing)
• The Social Media Revolution: You Oughta Be in Pictures (and Podcasting, and Vlogging) with Jeremiah Owyang (PodTech.net), Robert Scoble (PodTech), Thomas Hawk (Zooomr), Chris Pirillo (LockerGnome)

Be sure and visit us at booth #307 and see you there.

Oh, and for the ultra hip here’s a tip: check out Web 2.0pen. 

—Michael Mattis

Yahoo! Increases Quality Initiatives

The new VP of Marketplace Quality shares insights on Yahoo!’s higher traffic quality goals
 

As an advertiser or publisher, you may have some concerns regarding traffic quality. Yahoo! places a great importance on quality traffic and we’ve dedicated significant resources to create the world’s highest quality search and display advertising network.

We also hear that you want more transparency and dialogue with us, and that’s part of my new responsibilities in leading the company’s marketplace quality efforts and helping to drive the industry forward on these issues.

Click fraud is an industry-wide issue and there’s no question that click fraud is receiving increased media coverage recently, casting a dark cloud over the industry. I want to make it clear that we hear your concerns, and we’re putting a vast amount of resources to combat click fraud.

Since 1998, our Click Protection System has operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week, monitoring all traffic with the goal of filtering out click fraud, as well as other clicks that we believe shouldn’t be billed to our advertisers.

Today at Search Engine Strategies New York 2007 Conference (SES) we’re happy to announce that in the next few months, we plan to launch the Yahoo! Marketplace Quality Center, an online resource designed to help provide more visibility into what we’re doing to help define, prevent and protect against click fraud, plus provide information on other aspects of traffic quality.

Its features will include:

• Directions on how to submit a click investigation request
• News on traffic quality
• Tips on how to detect click fraud
• Articles on best practices and more

We plan to continue expanding and enhancing the Marketplace Quality Center with more features in the following months after the official launch.

We are also working with the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) to develop industry standards around click fraud. Once agreed-upon standards are in place, we’re fully committed to undergoing regular audits to provide advertisers with greater visibility into our protection efforts.

At SES, I’m gathering feedback regarding key areas of concern around traffic quality, and I want to give you the same opportunity here—just add your comments below, and I will read every one.

I’m excited about the opportunities to work with and help our advertisers and publishers in this area, and I want to assure you that we’re listening to your feedback and concerns.

—Reggie Davis, VP, Marketplace Quality

New Technology Solutions Center

How to Apply for the API

In a comment on last week’s post on managing incomplete campaigns, a blog reader asked about the Yahoo! Search Marketing application programming interface (API), or Web Service.

It was a timely question, because today we’ve released a new Technology Solutions section that allows Yahoo! Search Marketing Advertisers to apply for API access provided through our Enterprise Web Services (EWS). EWS enables you to develop software that interacts directly with Yahoo! Search Marketing campaign management systems. This service is for:

• Technically sophisticated advertisers
• Digital/online advertising agencies
• Search engine marketers
• Ecommerce companies
• Comparison shopping engines
• Campaign management technology providers
• Co-marketing referral partners

To learn more and apply for API access through EWS, visit our Technology Solutions page.

—The Team
 

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