Archive for November, 2007

Yahoo! at PubCon Las Vegas 2007

The Affordable Leading-Edge Conference for Search Marketers and Webmasters  is Not Just a Simulacra

Whether you’re new to online advertising or you’re a seasoned search marketing pro, WebmasterWorld’s Search & Internet Marketing Conference (“PubCon”), to be held next week at the Las Vegas Convention Center, is almost a guaranteed win.

For four days, in the hyper-real, postmodernist splendor of Vegas, PubCon will feature engaging topics to those interested in search marketing, Web 2.0, SEO, affiliate programs, domains, online video, multimedia and more.

Writing about Las Vegas, the French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, once wrote:

The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert, and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them: the mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.

But there’s no need to worry about being in the dark about search marketing and web publishing, because Yahoo! will be there to help shine a light on the way. PubCon 2007 will feature a special evening session featuring Guy Kawasaki and a panel with Yahoo! execs Tim Mayer and Dan Boberg. And don’t forget to attend Tuesday’s “Major PPC Engines – Vendor Panel,” featuring Yahoo! Search Marketing’s own Patrizio Spagnoletto.

For more information, check out the complete schedule. Be sure to visit the Yahoo! booth No. 502 on the conference floor, too. 

Vegas, as Baudrillard said, is the ultimate American simulacra of a city. Why go to Paris when you can gamble at the Paris, Las Vegas? Why visit the pyramids of Giza, when you can witness the wacky prop comedy of Carrot Top or watch an IMAX film about the Nile at the Luxor? Can’t decide whether to play blackjack, see priceless works of art in a casino lobby or spend $4.99 for a prime rib dinner (salad and dinner roll included)? No matter—you can do it all.

Take a break from chasing the ever-fleeting jackpot and get some real, practical takeaways for your search marketing efforts from the Yahoo! search luminaries at PubCon 2007.

When: December 4 to 7, 2007
Where: Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas

—Roger Park, Hipster of Hyperreality

Fine-Tuning

A Tweak Here, a Tweak There

Remember working on that old car on breezy Saturday Autumn afternoons? A little twist of the screwdriver here, the turn of a knob there and vroom! you had ‘er purring like a kitten.

Well, our engineers aren’t exactly your average shade-tree mechanics, but they do enjoy their work, and feel the same kind of satisfaction when they’ve got that baby hummin’ just right. Recently they’ve been working on ways to help you fine-tune your campaigns and add a little more torque to your account.

Campaign Tune-Up
Kind of like installing a nitro booster, we’ve revved up your account with a new tool called Campaign Tune-up. Campaign Tune-Up can help you optimize your Sponsored Search campaigns if you’re not running Campaign Optimizer. It automatically analyzes a campaign’s performance history, budget and business objectives, such as cost per click or conversions, and offers suggestions for bids, match types and budgets. You can either accept or reject the suggestions, but fine-tuning your bids could help your campaign run a lot better.

From your Campaign Details page, you’ll see a new link, “Tune-up Campaign.” Clicking the link starts the tuning. You can then set the business measurements that matter to you for tuning your campaign and will be walked through the rest of the process.

Sticky Widget
For our next tweak, we updated the system so that more of your preferences are remembered. As a result, viewing your account the way you want is easier and requires fewer clicks. These “sticky” preferences are also remembered each time your log into your account. This tweak affects the column-sorting on your Campaign Summary and Campaign Detail pages and your Ad Group Detail page.

Start tinkering and let us know what you think!

—Michael Mattis

Our “Getting to Know You” Survey

Understanding Your Information Needs

We’re hosting a survey to find out a little bit more about you. It asks you a bit about who you are, about your information needs, what you would like to get out of the blog, and so forth. The purpose of the survey is to help us create content that better serves your needs. And, of course, all information we gather is secure and confidential.

To access the survey, click here.

And thanks for reading and being a part of Yahoo! Search Marketing!

—Michael Mattis

Holiday Hours for Customer Support

Special Thanksgiving Day schedule

Because of the Thanksgiving holiday, Yahoo! Search Marketing Customer Support telephones will be offline on Thursday, November 24. We will reopen on Friday, November 22 with normal business hours through the rest of the weekend (Friday 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Pacific Time, Saturday 7:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Pacific Time, and Sunday 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time).

Thanks, and enjoy your holiday dinner with all the trimmings!

—Yahoo! Search Marketing Customer Support

Advertiser 2.0

BlogWorld 2007 Shows the Value of Blogging and New Media for Online Advertisers

Yahoo! sent a crew of us to the BlogWorld Expo last week and, boy, what a ride. Clearly, blogging and social media have certainly come of age. Blogs used to be seen as hobbies for quirky Gen-Xers with an itch to share the banal details of their dreary little lives. You know: “Macaroni and cheese for dinner…again! Mom called at nine and ragged me for a half hour about you-know-what…” Blah, blah, blah…

Blogging and Your Brand
But BlogWorld showed clearly that businesses that ignore the vast, electronic mega-conversation that is today’s Internet do so at their own peril. As Clint Schaff of M-80 and Blake Cahill of Visible Technologies pointed out in their seminar, opinions effect brands, and no business can hope to keep on top of its image without engaging with consumers through new media. All it takes for you to lose perhaps thousands of dollars in business is one aggressive, disgruntled customer to start a network of negativity that could reach through the ’Net.

We’re going to hear a lot more detail on this topic from Blake and Clint in the coming weeks, so for now we’ll leave you with a choice quote from their presentation: “You can join the conversation now, or procrastinate and have join the conversation later anyway.”

Crowdsourcing
You’ve heard of outsourcing, where a businesses contracts with others to get certain tasks done. Crowdsourcing is getting people outside your company to help do your marketing—for free—through social media and word-of-mouth. It involves engaging your customers and getting them to wax poetic about your products and services on their own blogs and in social networks. Why have a marketing team of ten, the saying goes, when you could have a marketing team of 10,000? This is another topic that we’ll get into more deeply in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, explore blogging and social media as options to help your company engage with customers and guide the conversation around your products and services.

Here’s some more BlogWorld coverage from around the Web:

There’s more to corporate blogging than just begging your CEO to let you set one up.

Here’s a great list of video interviews by our friends over at Build a Better Blog.

Zac Jonhson blogs Marc Cuban’s keynote speech.

For Flickr photos streams, click here and here.

—Michael Mattis

Improving Your Ad Copy

An Improved Feature to Help You Write Better Ads

In August we announced a number of enhancements to the system. Several of these involved improving the ad writing process. By far my favorite of these is the improved whatchamacallit, for lack of a better term, that shows you live ads that use your selected keyword(s). By offering this real-time information, this feature can help you write more effective ads, helping you improve your Quality Index score.

To use the watchamacallit:

• Log into your account.
• Click the Campaigns tab.
• Click on a campaign name.
• Click “Create New Ad” or the “edit” button for an existing ad.
• Click on any of the keywords.

A pop-up will appear showing up to six relevant ads for that keyword.

You can scroll through your keywords using the “Next Keyword” and “Previous Keyword” buttons. Using this feature can help you differentiate your ads from others’ in the same or similar niches when creating a new ad or editing an existing one.

And, by the way, we have found that advertisers who use more features like this one tend to get better results.

For more on this enhancement, visit the Help Center.

—Michael Mattis

Your Quality Index

A Quick Guide to Understanding and Improving It

You’ve seen the graphic display of your ads’ quality index in your secure account interface. It’s that little blue bar on each ad detail page that resembles the lighted bars you might find blinking on your stereo.

When all five sections of the bar are colored in blue, your quality index score is high. When three sections are filled in, your score is OK. When only one is filled in…well, you get the idea.

But what is this quality index thing, why does it matter, and how can you make it better?

It’s All Relative (and Relevant)
In a nutshell, an ad’s quality index is a relative measure of how relevant it is to users. In determining your quality index, our system takes into account your ad’s click-through rate compared to its average position in search results, as well as to that of other ads displayed at the same time, other keywords in your ad group, and other relevance factors.

Why Should I Care?
You should care because ads with a higher quality index can receive higher ranking in Sponsored Search results. Our system calculates an ad’s ranking based on your bid, your ad’s quality and other relevance factors. A high-quality ad may be ranked higher than a poor-quality ad, even if the poor-quality ad’s bid is higher.

Please note the graphic above is provided for illustrative purposes only

OK, so how do I Improve My Quality Index?
Your ad’s quality index reflects its ability to meet the needs and desires of users—that is, how well it helps them find what they want, quickly and accurately. If your ads don’t meet the needs of users, users are less likely to click them. Fewer clicks means fewer customers and conversions.

When this happens, nobody wins: not you, not us and not the user. High-quality ads, by contrast, can help create winners out of all of us. The quality index was set up to encourage advertisers to better meet the needs of users—who are, after all, the reason we are both here.

Here are a number of tactics you can use to improve the quality of your ads, and thus, your quality index:

Use relevant keywords—Make sure the keywords in your ad group are highly relevant to the ads in the same ad group.

Include your keyword in your creative—Using the keyword itself in titles and descriptions of your ad. You can use the Insert Keyword feature to help you do this automatically.

Take advantage of excluded keywords—Use this feature to block certain searches that you think may not be relevant. This can help keep your budget focused on more likely prospects. For example, if you sell portable radios but not ham radio equipment, you can block searches that include the word “ham.”

Use ad testing—You may have noticed that when you create an ad in an Ad Group, you are prompted to create another one. You should do this in all of your ad groups, because when you create more than one ad, our system will test the ads automatically. Ads that perform better then begin to appear more frequently in search results, and you can edit or delete ads that perform poorly. Try different copy, different offers or different display URLs to help determine what works best.

Gather intelligence—Almost all’s fair in love and advertising, so you shouldn’t feel shy about spying on your competitors. And by spying, we mean searching for their products or services so you can look at their ads—not breaking into their offices, tapping their phones or any of that illicit Watergate stuff, OK? Take a look at your competitors’ ads to determine if your offers are as strong as theirs.

Offer specials—Consider including special offers in your ad copy. Take a look at a calendar: It’s chock-full of holidays that you should consider taking advantage of. Limited-time offers, free shipping, two-for-ones, free gifts, contests and so forth can be very effective. Remember, it’s not just about your ad, it’s also about the value that users think you can deliver.

Resources

Bidding and Ranking Tutorial

Ranking Model Overview

Improving Ad Quality Blog Post Series

—Michael Mattis

More Holiday How-to’s

Join Us at Our Holiday Consumer Overview and Search Best Practices Web Conference

Our last holiday strategies webinar was so successful that we’ve added another. This free webinar, hosted by Pato Spagnoletto, our Senior Director of Marketing, will cover how users move between paid and algorithmic search, how to manage campaigns holistically in order to deliver superior performance, and offer tons of helpful tips and best practices for the holidays.

When: Wednesday, November 14, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time.
Where: Right from your computer.

To register, click here and follow the instructions.

—The Team