New Year, New System Upgrades

YaHal-9000’s Predictions Come True

You’ll remember the predictions from our master computer—YaHal-9000, a.k.a. The Exalted One—which we posted a few weeks back. One had already been realized at the time it was posted, but as of today yet another has already come to pass. No, not Number 4 (The Donald still has his head), but Number 3.

We told you that we’d continue to roll out new enhancements to the system in the New Year, and today we’re announcing the first set of them. We’re hoping these improvements will help you to generate more effective keywords faster, help you better target your keywords for search, better track your metrics, and stay up to date on your campaign tune-ups.

New Keyword Generator Options
Brain hurting from thinking of new keywords? We’ve substantially enhanced the keyword generator tool. You now have three easy options for adding keywords to existing ad groups, all accessible in a single drop-down menu.

Quick Add—Lets you add up to 500 keywords directly if you know what you already want.

Choose from List—We provide a list of related keywords based on the existing keywords in your ad group, from which you can select.

Research Keywords—A shortcut to the existing keyword generator interface, which generates keyword suggestions based on descriptions of your business or based on your website URL.

To try the new options, click the Campaigns tab, then on any ad group. You’ll see the drop-down on your ad group summary page.

Excluded Keywords
Now with more exclusion! We’ve expanded the maximum number of account-level and ad group-level excluded keywords from 50 to 250, which should help you better target searches and block unwanted ones. Excluded keywords are only applicable to the Advanced match type distribution tactic in Sponsored Search. (Even if you could use them in Standard match, it wouldn’t make any sense.) Remember, excluded words can be set at the account level (under the Administration tab) and the ad group level (in the ad group setting page).

Here are a couple of tips for using excluded keywords:
• Identify the keywords that do not apply to your business but may be commonly used by potential customers. For example, if you only sell new TVs, you may want to exclude words such as “repair” and “used.”
• Be selective when choosing your excluded keywords at the account level, since they apply to all keywords in your account.

Enhanced Ad Optimization
We’d be the first to say that there’s more to search marketing than clicks. Ad optimization now lets you optimize your ads for conversions, revenue or impressions— not just for clicks—so that the ads that best meet the metrics you set are shown more frequently. You can set your optimization guidelines at the campaign or ad group level. If you use conversion tags, your ads’ display will be automatically optimized for revenue or conversions, but you can change your settings at any time.

Tuning-up Campaign Tune-up
Ding! Your campaign tune-up is done. OK, there’s no actual sound, but now when you run our recently announced campaign tune-up in the background, you’ll receive an alert in your dashboard telling you to check it out.

Posted by Administrator

[ Categories: Announcements, Updates & Enhancements ]

23 Comments Add your own

1. New Year, New System Upgr&hellip | February 1st, 2008 at 12:17 pm

[...] post by Administrator and posted by Alfred [...]
2. James | February 1st, 2008 at 1:16 pm

Awesome this is great news! I like excluded keywords increase. thanks
3. Prasanna | February 1st, 2008 at 2:37 pm

Some encouraging new features especially by increasing the excluded keywords cap from 50 to 250. However I personally feel that there shouldn’t be a limit on number of excluded keywords. Advertisers should be allowed to add as many excluded keywords as much they like.

Still no signs of day parting tool yet. Hopefully in next upgrade we will be able to use day parting feature.
4. Ryan | February 1st, 2008 at 2:38 pm

The Negative keyword adjustment came just in time! I’ll definitely be able to make use of those.

Thanks!
5. Friday Roundup - February&hellip | February 2nd, 2008 at 10:54 am

[...] New Year, New System Upgrades – A nice big list of useful upgrades coming to Y!SM. [...]
6. james e pless | February 3rd, 2008 at 6:25 am

At the age of 80 years, I find myself in a maze of frustration, although it is exciting to continue to pick at this stuff.
7. Robb Lochaber | February 3rd, 2008 at 8:55 am

These look to be some nice improvements. Lets hope they perform as intended.
8. Russell Blanc | February 3rd, 2008 at 9:40 am

That’s great to know. I have been asking for an increase to the excluded keywords for over a year now. The increase in excluded keywords is excellent.
9. Unfallversicherungen | February 3rd, 2008 at 1:19 pm

great information.. i’ll try it
10. Sandee Righton | February 4th, 2008 at 2:29 pm

Hi there,
I would really like it better if you would approved our ads faster so they have no interuptions. That costs me business whebn they are down.
11. New Yahoo! Search Marketi&hellip | February 5th, 2008 at 8:32 pm

[...] Search Marketing released some upgrades that help enable users maximize ad [...]
12. Tad Miller | February 6th, 2008 at 7:50 am

Bravo on adding more negative keywords. But how about giving us an easy way to upload them in just like keywords we want to advertise on, if that’s not possible in the short term, how about adding instructions on how to add them – There is no clear way on how to do this ANYWHERE!

The next step should be adding a layer of transparency like Google has by showing us how Advanced Match is “broadly” matching to the actual search query that triggers the Yahoo Ad. For now everyone is just adding the negative keyword lists they have gotten from Google Search Query Reports. Yahoo users are a different personna and I would prefer to base my excluded keyword decisions on Yahoo search data instead of Google data.

Excluded keywords wouldn’t be as necessary if Advance Match didn’t match so broadly. How about letting us use both Standard and Advance Match at the same time. I would gladdly up my bids on Standard Match if I could use both at the same time.
13. SEO Company | February 6th, 2008 at 10:25 am

Good news!!!!
14. Taylor | February 14th, 2008 at 9:51 am

So, does this mean that ‘Excluded Keywords’ do not work with content campaigns? Negative keywords are an essential part of a successful content campaign.
15. Positive Negative News Fr&hellip | February 14th, 2008 at 10:30 am

[...] Here’s a nice positive Y announcement, albeit involving negativity. Italics mine: Excluded Keywords We’ve expanded the maximum number of account-level and ad group-level excluded keywords from 50 to 250, which should help you better target searches and block unwanted ones. Excluded keywords are only applicable to the Advanced match type distribution tactic in Sponsored Search…. Remember, excluded words can be set at the account level (under the Administration tab) and the ad group level (in the ad group setting page). – from Yahoo Search Marketing Blog, Feb 1 2008 [...]
16. trader | February 14th, 2008 at 3:51 pm

yes, negative words are good
17. Geoff | February 15th, 2008 at 10:23 am

Excellent innovations! I particulary like the new keyword feature, which should make things a bit easier, and quicker, to get good keywords.
18. ahennessy | February 15th, 2008 at 11:16 am

I’m having a hard time adjusting to the new tool. It never gives us the complete list of related keywords. Sometimes terms come up and sometimes they don’t. I find this tool less useful as the old keyword search tool and find myself using other search engines to fulfill my keyword research. The new tool is very inconsistent and can be quite frustrating. I pray for the old research tool to return.
19. Is Paul McCartney Dead? | February 15th, 2008 at 12:03 pm

Sounds Great!
20. Rod | February 17th, 2008 at 9:40 am

That is great. The next thing I would recommend and really as for is the ability to exclude more than 250 blocked domains. I rapidly ran into the 250 blocked domain limit and need to exclude many more than that. I would suggest that 1000 blocked domains would be much better.
21. Copenhagen Denmark | June 14th, 2008 at 11:13 am

I have to say I love YSM, both for the easy to use interface and for the results it brings

some things I’d appreciate a lot are:

- no 1000kws limit per ad group (there are lots of cases where more than 1000 keywords would fit in a single ad group, and having to create new adgroups takes a lot of time

- possibility to clone ad groups so that the whole process gets quicker

- possibility to add larger amounts of keywords not having to past small pieces of our keywords lists
22. InternetMarketingAdvice.n&hellip | June 16th, 2008 at 7:59 am

[...] New Keyword Generator Tool – Yahoo enhanced their keyword generator tool at the start of 2008. The tool enables you to add up to 500 keywords to your account instantly, provides a list of related keywords for a given ad group, and provides suggestions for keywords based on a given URL or description. [...]
23. faizkhan | February 26th, 2009 at 7:39 am

Hi,
May I give suggest “Yahoo Programmer team” please introduce the Yahoo Desktop Tool like a Google AdWords Editor or MSN AdCenter Desktop (Beta).

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