Archive for March, 2008

New Hours for Customer Support

On March 31, 2008, Yahoo! Search Marketing Customer Support hours will change to the following:

Monday – Friday: 6:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. Pacific Time
Saturday: 7:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. Pacific Time

During those times you may contact our Customer Support Team by phone at (866) 924-6676, and we’ll be happy to help you with any questions you may have regarding your Sponsored Search advertising.

 –The Team

Chasing our Long Tails

Rethinking the value of long-tail keywords
Once upon a time, everyone in PPC “chased the tail” on keywords to find keywords that no one else is bidding upon. But search marketers are starting to look at their long-tail keywords and ask if they’re worth the hassle.

The evolution of the long tail
The long tail— the concept of finding value in low-volume search terms got a bump into mass consciousness in 2006 when Chris Anderson published “The Long Tail”.

The concept of the Long Tail is a popularized view of a statistical norm that basically says: Although consumers buy only a small percentage of products in high volumes, there is demand for a wide variety of products in low volume.
This distribution curve illustrates a “long tail” effect (original illustration by Hay Kranen/PD, Wikipedia Commons license). Read more about long tails.

Think of this curve as it applies to popular search queries: There are millions of searches for “Britney Spears” (a “head” term with high search volume), but only a few for “Al Yankovic” and related Al Yankovic terms. As you move down the tail, you find a more fragmented audience—but these are people who are looking for something specific, like “Al Yankovic fan clubs”, and may be more receptive to your messages.

In the past, the cost to reach this audience through traditional marketing methods diminished its value to marketers. But search marketing allows us to target this potentially valuable “tail” audience at a lower cost than ever before, and, as such, PPC advertisers build huge keyword lists of these tail terms. The assumption is that tail words are more targeted, and therefore, more likely to convert. And since there is likely to less competition for the keyword by other advertisers, the cost-per-click may be less.

Mine’s Bigger!
PPC advertisers used to brag of their giant portfolios: “I manage 50,000 keywords!” We were told to expand, expand, expand. Mine your logs, ask your friends, concatenate lists, memorize a thesaurus and torture a linguist!

The idea of the long tail is still going strong, it seems. At CES recently, Bill Gates promoted the “Long Tail Olympics”, which might finally give a chance for stardom to badminton champions the world over.

But over here in PPC land, there’s been a gradual change in attitude about the tail and its eventual value in a keyword portfolio. Some campaign managers are starting to reduce their keyword portfolios, not increase them, and with a valid concern: long-tail keywords with low-impression or zero-impression scores may weigh down an overall quality score in ad groups. As a result, we recommend that you isolate these words into separate ad groups to prevent them from dragging down your campaign performance.

Also, the maturity of the market means that many long-tail terms can now be more expensive than their head term counterparts, since head terms are usually less targeted and may yield lower click/conversion rates compared to their impressions (”Britney Spears CD” as a term may cost far more than “Britney Spears,” since the former is specifically tied to a potential product purchase as opposed to, say, a public breakdown).

Keep Chasing the Tail
However, once you’ve set your low-impression keywords up in their own ad groups—and you’re aware of the ones that could potentially cost you more—there’s no reason to avoid long-tail terms. So go ahead—keep chasing the tail and looking for possibilities. And if you hate going to the IT department and asking for referral reports (or your tracking software is a pain to use), you can set up yourself and a few competitors in a service such as Compete.com or KeywordDiscovery, and quickly discover new keyword ideas.

Ultimately you may decide that some long-tail keywords cost more to manage than they’re worth, and that’s a perfectly valid conclusion, too. If it costs you more time to write an ad, manage bidding and track ROI for a keyword than it generates in a year, then heck yeah, cut it! But for those who love the idea of catching a hyper-targeted customer at a ridiculously low price, sometimes the possibilities are worth the risk.

– Dana Todd, Executive Vice President, SiteLab Interactive, Inc.

New Guidelines for Questionable Products

Things to avoid if you don’t like “no” for an answer

As you may already know, we don’t accept ads for certain types of content. Recently, we have added a few categories of unacceptable content to our guidelines. They include: 

• Cigarettes—Sure, James Dean looks cool smoking in that “Rebel Without A Cause” movie poster, but in our search listings we will not accept ads that sell, facilitate the sale, or promote the sale of cigarettes.
• Essay-Writing Services—School is hard, writing papers is a drag, but going through life never learning a thing is even more painful. We no longer accept ads that promote academic paper-writing services and the sale of pre-written essays, theses and dissertations. 
•  Fake IDs and Fake Diplomas—These days lots of things can be fake—nails, lips, other body parts…. But we have to draw the line at fake IDs or credentials. For that reason, we will not accept ads that offer fake IDs, diplomas or educational transcripts.
• Firearms, Ammunition and Fireworks—Go blow ‘em up and shoot ‘em up somewhere else, because we will not accept ads that offer or promote the sale of fireworks, firearms or integral parts for these weapons.

Quality web pages
Speaking of websites, we are also big believers in quality over quantity; therefore, we’ve recently added a few additional quality guidelines. These apply to web pages that are created deliberately to trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant or poor-quality search results. The new guidelines include prohibitions against:

• Pages that change browser preferences without permission (such as resetting the default home page or resizing browser windows).
• Pages offering or promoting bulk marketing products or services if the stated or implied use of the product is unsolicited spam email.
• Pages designed to artificially inflate search ranking (such as encoding meta tags or hidden keywords).

As always, our ultimate goal is to offer relevant results that provide the ultimate search experience and user satisfaction—and that’s why sometimes we turn away ad dollars.

Visit here for more information on Yahoo’s Editorial Guidelines.

— Kastle Waserman, Communications Manager, Customer Solutions

Photo by Paul Thomas via Flickr

Vote for Better Search in ’08

Three ways to interact with your search “constituents”

For the good of our nation, I have decided not to run for president in ’08. But I’m still ready to offer advice to anyone who is.

And so for all of you presidential hopefuls who are also readers of the YSM blog, I’ve decided to answer the question: What does every Oval Office aspirant need to know about paid search marketing?

(If you’re not running for president, not to worry—everything I have to say here can be adapted pretty quickly to better search marketing for businesses, too.)

The answer is simple. You need to deal with your search constituents in three different ways:
1.   As people who want to help you.
2.   As people who want to learn about you.
3.   As people, plain and simple.

1. People who want to help you.
In politics, your “low-hanging fruit” is the group of people who want to donate, volunteer, and/or vote for you.

It’s likely that these people will search for you by name (or by a nickname or a misspelling of your name). It’s also likely that their search language will explain how they’d like to help. If I were running for president, some of my search supporters might type in “donate abe mezrich,” others might search for “volunteer for abe mezrich,” and still others might search for “mezrich voting stations.”

Each of these searchers wants to relate to me in a slightly different way. I’ll need to consider relating to them accordingly with a different search creative and landing page.

2. People who want to learn about you.
Plenty of voters turn to search to learn more about the candidates. Some research a candidate’s views on specific issues, with queries like “abe mezrich tax policy” or “abe mezrich health care.” Others search for information about all the candidates at once, searching on terms like “candidates war in Iraq” or “election 08 tax policy.” Since voters are deciding if they want to vote for you based on the issues, you should consider offering issue-specific search creatives and landing pages.

3. People.
You’re not in the market for search clicks. You’re not even in the market for votes. You’re in the market for relationships with millions of unique people, each of whom is vital to your election, and your search campaign should relate to those individuals in the way that best suits them.

Often, that will mean looking beyond the keyword and asking who’s really searching for you, and why. Just one example: A search for “candidate tax policy” means one thing coming from a Kentucky millionaire in her mid-thirties, and something very different from a Florida retiree. You’ll want to relate to both of those searchers in a different way.

When you’re working out search strategy, here are a few key voter/searcher demographic questions to ask:

• Do voters in different geographic locations express different concerns about the same issue?
• Are different geographic regions better for driving voters, donors, and/or volunteers?

Use your smarts, your analytics capabilities, and tools like Yahoo! Search Marketing’s geo-targeting to interact with your searchers in the way that best suits each sub-constituency.

My Campaign Promise
I can’t guarantee that my campaign search strategies will win you an election. But if you deal with your online constituents as people who want to help you, people who want to learn more about you, and just as people, then I can promise that your search marketing will go much further in getting you the donations you want, the votes you need, and a helpful leg up on the competing candidates.

And that’s a lot to get from a marketing campaign, which is why it’s a platform that I’m happy to stump for.

— Abe Mezrich, Communications Manager, Didit

Image courtesy of webbmb via Flickr.

The Quality Impact

Four lessons in how ad quality can change your minimum bids

No doubt you’ve heard plenty of times that “It’s not quantity, but quality that counts.” You might have an older relative who also reminds you that “You can’t get blood from a turnip.”  (Or is that a stone? I forget.) But even if you’re not fond of clichés, for Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers, quality—your ad quality—is more important than ever, given the upcoming change to the way minimum bids are set.

Why is ad quality so important?
• With higher ad quality, in some cases, you may receive a lower minimum bid.
• With higher ad quality, you may be able to achieve better ad positions for the same price.
• With higher ad quality, your ads should be more relevant—so more users should click on your ads.

Here are four tips to help you manage your ad quality:

Tip #1: Track your ad quality
The quality index is displayed for both ad groups and their associated ads on the Ad Group details page. Use the Ad Performance Report, which is available in the reports tab, to help you know how your ads are performing.

Tip #2: Write better ads
It’s wise to include the keyword you’re bidding in the title description of your ad. This can make your ad more relevant to potential customers. Highlight the strengths of your product or service and use a landing page that is specific and relevant to users’ search queries. Update your ads regularly, too. You can learn more about writing better ad copy here.

Tip #3: Ad testing with optimization
Your minimum bids are based on individual keyword and ad combinations, so testing ads can reveal which ads work best. Use ad optimization to automatically display the ads that are being clicked on more often. Here’s more information on ad testing.

Tip #4: Group relevant keywords together in your ad groups
Make keywords in an ad group relevant to each other and to their ads, which can increase relevance to users. Your quality index looks at the normalized click-through rate for all keywords in an ad group, but pay special attention to high-volume keywords. Because they are displayed more often, they can affect your quality index more than low-volume keywords.

With these simple tips in mind, it’s good to continually monitor for any changes. So, the maxim “It’s not quantity, but quality that counts” can be true as “There are truths in some clichés.” Or is that another cliché?

Either way, keep an eye on your quality, and I’ll keep an eye on my overuse of clichés.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

Search Engine Strategies, New York 2008

Gotham to host SES expo and conference  

O Manhattan, home of skyscrapers, the Yankees, Woody Allen, Broadway, The Statue of Liberty, hip hop and most importantly, Manhattan clam chowder!

Next week, from March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day) to March 20 (Spring Equinox), Manhattan will also be home to the Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo.

SES NY 2008 features presentations and panel discussions that cover all aspects of search engine-related marketing. Yahoo! will be there on the expo floor at booth #2009 with dedicated Yahoos there to answer your questions.

If you’re heading to SES NY 2008, you definitely want to check out these insightful Yahoo! panelists:

Monday, March 17
9:30 – 10:45 a.m.
Creating Compelling Ads
Speaker: Jason Dorn, Senior Director, Network Quality Team, Yahoo! Inc.

11:15 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Igniting Viral Campaigns
Speaker: Conn Fishburn, Director of Social Media Strategy, Yahoo! Inc.

2:00 – 3:15 p.m.
Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud Issues
Speaker: Reggie Davis, Vice President, Marketplace Quality, Yahoo! Inc.

Tuesday, March 18
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.
Ads in a Quality Score World
Speaker: David Miller, Sr. Product Manager, Sponsored Search, Yahoo! Inc.

Wednesday, March 19
10:15 – 11:30 a.m.
Social Media Marketing - What is it and What is it Good For?
Speaker: Conn Fishburn, Director of Social Media Strategy, Yahoo! Inc.

5:30 – 6:45 p.m.
Searcher Behavior Research Update
Moderator: Edwin Wong, Director, Market Research, Yahoo! Search Marketing

5:30 – 6:45 p.m.
Ad Exchanges Are Changing Everything
Speaker: Ramsey McGory, VP, Global Exchange, Right Media, a Yahoo! company

Thursday, 20 March
9:00 – 9:45 a.m.
Morning Keynote
Speaker: Andrew Tomkins, Chief Scientist, Yahoo! Search

12:25 – 1:45 p.m.
Meet the Crawlers
Speaker: Sean Suchter, Vice President, Yahoo! Search Technology Engineering, Yahoo

So head to SES NY 2008 to hear top search engine industry minds discuss the ever-changing media landscape. Just bring me back some chowder.

– Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

The Good, the Bad, the Creative

Seven tips to make sure your ad’s aim is true

When it comes to your ad copy, there’s good, there’s bad, and—I know this all too well—there’s sometimes ugly. Like the desperadoes in the old westerns, the latter need to be rounded up and sent away.

To help us clean up this town we call Sponsored Search, we’ve put together our own magnificent seven—tips, that is:

1. Keyword Inclusion – Whenever possible, make sure to use the keyword in your titles and descriptions. It can help make them more relevant and attractive to the people searching on them.
2. Keyword Insertion and Alt Text – Keyword Insertion helps ensure that the keyword always appears in the ad, and Alt Text helps the ad to read correctly and appear the way you want it to.
3. Quality and Clarity – Clear, effective titles and descriptions give searchers a distinct idea of who you are and what you have to offer. Avoid spelling and grammar mistakes, as well as poorly worded titles and descriptions.
4. Relevance – Make sure that your ads are relevant to the keywords in your ad group. Avoid “catch-all” ad copy that simply doesn’t fit with certain keywords.
5. Keyword/Creative Conflict – Avoid ad copy that appears to clash with your offerings, such as a description that stresses low prices on shoes when in fact you primarily sell shirts. Even when the keyword appears in the creative, searchers may skip the ad if you stress something else.
6. Competitive Advantage – If you got it, flaunt it! If you offer something that may give you an edge such as free shipping or a low price guarantee, be sure to mention it in your copy.
7. Ad Testing – By creating multiple ads, you can use ad testing to test the viability of your ads and see which message resonates more with searchers. Routinely checking on the status and performance of your ads will help you stay on top of consumer response.

Now that you’re armed with ideas, you can have your bad ads heading out of town by high noon, if not sooner.

— Noah Belson, Content Quality Analyst

Photo courtesy of freeparking via Flickr

Crunch Time

Tear yourself away from The Madness for a few minutes to take a closer look at your keywords in light of the upcoming minimum bid change

It’s March, and all across this land of ours, people are hard at work on their computers, trying to figure out…who could win the NCAA basketball tournament. Is Davidson for real, is UCLA the team to beat—or is it Tennessee, North Carolina, or some fabled “Cinderella” team?

Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers may want to put down their brackets for a few minutes and spend an equal amount of time taking a deep dive into their pool of keywords, because with the upcoming change to the way minimum bids are set, it’s a whole new game.

Staying Off the Bubble

In the next few weeks, the switch will be flipped on this new feature, and with it come both opportunities and potential pitfalls. If you have keywords with minimum bids that go down, you may be able to reallocate your money to other keywords or by expanding your keyword roster. Conversely, if you have minimum bids that are headed north, it would be good to know whether you should raise your bids or let the associated keywords go inactive.

You can get ready for the tip-off of the new minimum bid feature by taking a closer look at your keywords, both now and after the new bid requirements are in play. Here are some suggestions on where to focus your efforts:

1. Learn which keywords work best for your business.

• Identify your most important keywords by comparing their click-through rates, click volume and performance metrics.
• Add these all-star keywords to your “watched keywords” list for easy reference going forward.
• Continue to monitor performance metrics regularly to identify changes, both positive and negative.

2. Put your trust in your proven winners.

• Invest more of your budget in keywords that are doing well, and get rid of poorly performing ones.
• Review their bids and make sure you are bidding to the true value of the keyword.
• Diversify: If minimum bids are raised on some of your keywords, find some that remain at lower levels and make them more prominent in your lineup.
• Set bids at the keyword level, when appropriate, for greater control.

3. Group relevant keywords together.

• Keywords in a single ad group should relate to each other and to the ads in your ad group. This can have a big impact on your quality score, and, potentially, your minimum bids.
• Move more general keywords into their own ad group(s) so they don’t affect the quality of your targeted ad groups.

4. Budget wisely.

• Have an understanding of what you can spend, so if you do face a situation where minimum bids are higher, you can decide whether to raise bids or increase budgets.
• As you set bids, make sure that they meet your ad budget and acquisition targets.

— Jeff Hecox, Bracketologist “Keywordologist”

Photo courtesy dearth85 via Flickr.

More (Keyword) Power, Please

The enhanced Add Keywords feature can help you power up your search marketing campaigns

The crux of a generator is to produce power. Massive generators provide electrical power for cities. Portable generators power your campsite or tailgate party. A guitar amplifier generates sound for your guitars whether you’re soloing or playing power chords.

In your search marketing campaign, relevant keywords help drive traffic, but generating the right keywords can be a labor-intensive process.

To give you more search marketing power, we recently expanded our Add Keywords feature to provide you with three easy options for adding keywords to existing ad groups. Think of it as a convenient and easy-to-operate engine that can help you generate keywords.

Here’s why you should take advantage of the Add Keywords tool
• It has an easy-to-use drop-down menu with three options to meet your needs.
• Adding more relevant keywords may improve the performance of your ad group.
• It can save you time in determining what keywords to add.

Where to Find the Add Keywords Tool
The Add Keywords tool is located on your Ad Group details page. Just click on “Add Keywords” then select one of three options: “Quick Add,” “Choose from List” and “Research Keywords.”

The Quick Add Keywords Option (New!)
Clicking on this option will open a dialogue box. Just enter the keywords or keyword phrases you want and click “Save Changes.” This is a really easy way, when you know what keywords you want, to add keywords to your account. Be careful not to use commas or semicolons at the end of each line when you enter keywords in the dialogue box. You can add up to 500 keywords or keyword phrases.

Choose from List
This option uses existing information from your ad group and doesn’t require your input. A list of related keywords based on information about your ad group will appear if you click on this option. You can then add keywords to your ad group by selecting the checkbox next to the keywords and then clicking “Save Changes” when you’re done.

Research Keywords
This feature is similar to the Add Keywords function with which you may already be familiar. If you choose this option you can continue to add keywords to your list by entering keywords in the box on the left, or keyword phrases into the gray input box on the right side of your screen. The left box will generate some keyword suggestions after you click “Get Keywords.” When you’re finished, click “Save Changes.”

There you go—three easy options for adding relevant keywords are now in your power!

For more information, visit the Help center.

– Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

Slice up Your Advertising Pie

One advertiser’s experience can help you set up your budgets right

One of the reps on our Customer Solutions team recently took a call from a new advertiser, who had run into a roadblock that left him perplexed.

Apparently he awoke one morning at 3:00 a.m., his brain churning with an idea for a campaign for a product he sells on his site. He jumped on the computer to set up the new campaign, picking keywords, writing ads and setting bids. Feeling confident that this new campaign was going to get a ton of clicks, he set a daily spending limit of $50 and went back to bed.

But a few days later, when he checked its results, he discovered that the campaign was getting capped at about $20 in clicks each day. Care to guess what the problem was? (I’ll wait…)

And the answer is: He forgot to check if he had enough room in his account budget for the new campaign.

Too Many Hands in the Pie
This tale makes an important point: One tweak to an account can affect everything else. Think of your account budget as your “money pie”; you have to slice it up just right. Each of your campaigns will take a piece.

So if you add a new campaign, its spend will eat up a portion of the pie, leaving less spend for your existing campaigns. The account budget trumps other spending limits; you can’t spend more than your account limit. This seems like an obvious fact, but as our unwitting advertiser discovered, it can be lost in the excitement of launching a new campaign. To make room for the new campaign, you might have to consider reducing the spend from other campaigns, so that all of your “slices” add up to the total account budget.

If you’re off balance—no matter how high you set the daily spend of your biggest campaign—your other campaigns could be shut off as our system works to keep you from going over your budget. In this case, you’d need to either bake a bigger account pie, or cut your campaigns into smaller slices. Who’s hungry?

Cooking up the Perfect Search Marketing Plan
Before creating a new campaign, think about how much money you have to work with across your entire account. Then set up your campaign budgets to spend their portions of the account budget accordingly. As you tinker around with budgets, if you’re not sure how your changes will play out, make sure you take advantage of the forecasting tools in your account. As you enter different bid amounts, it analyzes statistics to help predict what your average position could potentially be in the search results, and thus, what your potential is for impressions and clicks.

Don’t “Set and Forget”
You should always be monitoring all parts of your account on a regular basis. This is your business and your money, so get in the habit of scanning all of the information on the dashboard.

If you simply “set and forget,” you’re giving up one of the biggest advantages that search marketing has over any other advertising vehicles—the ability to change, re-adjust, tinker and refocus your strategies at any time to reach your target audience. And take a lesson from one of your colleagues: If you decide to make any changes, consider how they will affect the daily spends set for your individual campaigns, and your account as a whole. You’ll sleep much better at night for it!

— Kastle Waserman, Communications Manager, Customer Solutions

Blueberry pie picture from hfb on Flickr

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