Don’t You Dare

What not to do with your search account

We’ve already nagged you plenty about the things that successful advertisers should do—and it isn’t just cleaning your room or taking out the trash.

But sometimes knowing what not to do is just as important. When it comes to creating and managing your ads, avoiding certain mistakes before you make them can save serious time and headaches down the road. Here’s a quick breakdown of the pitfalls to avoid, which should help you realize a better return on your investment, and help our users see better search results.

Content
Don’t bid on keywords for which you don’t offer content. While these tempting keywords may drive traffic to your site, they will almost certainly fail to convert into sales, not to mention tick off the users who clicked on your ad.Make sure you have substantial content that’s relevant to the keyword, rather than just a picture, search results or a link to another site.

Titles and descriptions
Don’t write titles and descriptions that are confusing, misleading or too subjective. Try to create concise titles and descriptions that accurately describe your site and give users a precise idea of what they’ll find there. Don’t include things like superlatives (”world’s greatest”), gimmicky language (“$$$”), exclamation points or words in all capital letters. Also, be sure to include correct spelling and grammar, write your titles in title case (capitalize the first letter of most words) and write your descriptions in regular sentence case.

URLs
Users need to be able to easily find what they’re looking for on your page, or they may decide to look elsewhere. So don’t submit landing page URLs that aren’t clearly relevant to your keywords or that lead to pages with nothing but ads or sponsored links. Make sure that users will be able to discern between your content and your ads. Avoid submitting landing pages with pop-ups, pop-unders or exit consoles. Make sure all landing pages allow users to use the back button of their browser.

Page Quality and Unacceptable Content
We’re concerned about the quality of our search results, so we try to only show ads that lead to information that’s valuable to users. We don’t accept ads leading to pages with inappropriate, deceptive, redundant or poor-quality content. Likewise, we may not accept ads relating to certain products or services or ads relating to areas of questionable legality. For more details please review our complete guidelines on page quality and unacceptable content.

By following these rules (or, depending on how you look at it, by not following them) you’ll help your account to have relevant keywords, targeted ads and URLs that lead users right to what you offer. It may be one of the few times in life when not doing something can have such positive results.

— Noah Belson, Content Quality Analyst

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[ Categories: Did You Know?, How (Not)-To's ]
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23 Comments Add your own

1. Dazzill Friklend | September 13th, 2008 at 7:44 am

I’m try to create new account on YSM , but have a problem… All active , editoral status is active , but i don’t see my Title on search. What happened with yahoo ? After 2 hour don’t may to login and see message you have granted access . Thanks for all .
2. The Unit | September 14th, 2008 at 4:59 pm

This should go without saying…
3. Brian | October 16th, 2008 at 10:38 am

Yahoo search is a ripoff. Used their suggestion tool and didnt notice they upped my bid to $12! Burned through all my money in one day with not one sale. Then wouldnt give me a refund. Bye YSM
4. Twitwoot | October 16th, 2008 at 10:44 am

To Brian: That actually doesn’t sound like YSM’s fault…that’s why it’s called a suggestion. If you said “i want 1st position” and that was the bid for you to get there, then it did it’s job. That’s why you have to check things and set yourself where you want to be.

I actually don’t have a problem with YSM, and like their tools. I have experienced some odd click activity before, but i addressed this to Yahoo and they investigated, and refunded the money spent.

To this article, yep…it should definitely go without saying, but you never know i suppose.
5. Jens | October 16th, 2008 at 10:47 am

Yahoo is definitely a ripoff. Their bid prices are much higher than Google or MSN.
6. Mike | October 16th, 2008 at 10:51 am

You always need to be careful about bid prices. You need to test small, monitor closely, and kill what isn’t making sales quickly.

Having alot of great content is key too. If you have alot of content, and have a well-structured sales funnel built out, you are well-ahead of many other people out there.

The top marketers can afford to bid more, and even lose money on the first sale, because each customer is more valuable to them. (And, they know exactly how valuable each customer is.)

It is easy to get excited, jump in, and get burned. That’s why I stepped away from PPC for a little, in order to build up my site and add to my sales funnel. Also executing a social media strategy to drive free traffic.

Then, I’ll get a good feel of the value of each reader, and can go back to attack PPC with more experience, knowledge, and a better chance of succeeding.
7. New Homes | Greater Metro Atlanta | October 16th, 2008 at 11:13 am

This is one aspect of YSM that I like over Google; ad relevancy helps to keep cost under control too.
8. SEO Training | October 16th, 2008 at 11:34 am

I echo Mike’s comments, start small and test, test, test. Test not only the keyword list but the ads and the landing pages.
9. mike teague | October 16th, 2008 at 11:40 am

raising rates during the holiday-it great for Yahoo-bad for my business-the economy is bad-people will look around more-not spending-costing the merchant more-less sales and Yahoo has a great holiday season - my company is taking off all advertising till Jan - hope other companies do the same!!!!!!!!!!
10. Traffic Ticket | October 16th, 2008 at 12:25 pm

Great ideas here! I think it also helps us to sell our products and services better online by following these SEM guidelines.

Thanks for the great post!
11. J M | October 16th, 2008 at 1:10 pm

Thank you for the useful pointers, Yahoo.

The trouble is, people would rather whine and blame, than do the hard work to maximize their marketing platform. You are telling people how to succeed.

How many do you think are actually going to read this, and follow your advice?

It IS tough to come up with great content and great landing pages, but if you do your keyword research and know your market thoroughly, and have an excellent product at the right price point, you will succeed.

But as someone else has said here, you need to test and track. Set your budget small, and don’t expect instant results.

Don’t go for broad keywords, and burn through your cash, go for targetted niches and make sure you have a relevant product.

By testing different ads, and different landing pages and conversion rates, you can see which is most successful, and do more of it.

Don’t fall for the ‘eyeball myth’. Eyeballs don’t have wallets. You need to not just get them to look, but to BUY.

And if you don’t have an email capture on your site for lead generation, then you are also wasting money.

And if you did not get a single sale, no matter what the price of the bid, clearly there is something wrong with your sales letter.

As for the bids, it is competitive, and new players will come in, and old ones drop out. Take the suggestions as just that, suggestions, and track where you are, test, and track and test again.

Taking off all ads til January just means that you are going to be missing out on opportunties that many other advertisers will be all too happy to take advantage of.

As for Google being cheaper, I have been getting far more clicks on Yaho for far cheaper, and you fail to mention that Google’s quality score is a bizarre algorithm that changes randomly, meaning I was earning great cash one day, then got Google-slapped and earned $0 and in fact have STILL not been able to restore those campaigns no matter what I have done-content, url, landing page, and so forth.

Google will actually penalize you for things like iframes in your design–how is that fair? Or not having your email address on the page. Or having a lead generation aspect to the site.

Google makes all the rules, and you can’t play even if you DO have the cash.

With Yahoo, I get great traffic, that converts!, and no guessing games.
12. www.redflarekits.com | October 16th, 2008 at 1:54 pm

Why is Yahoo Shopping not free? It is a major issue I take with yahooo. I literally get 10 times more traffic from Google then from yahoo because I cannot submit free product feeds to yahoo shopping.

The bottom line: Yahoo Shopping should be FREE to use!
13. tom p | October 16th, 2008 at 2:20 pm

Speaking of yahoo… I paid a $299 annual fee for Yahoo! Express Directory Listing and have no Idea what I recieved, if anything. Does anyone no what it is supposed to do?
14. Alan | October 16th, 2008 at 2:53 pm

I find more people shop with Yahoo than with google names. I keep track of the email names with a yahoo email account.

Learn to write quality adds with a good landing page can save you some $$$ in the bidding wars.
15. Matt | October 16th, 2008 at 4:29 pm

I too get more bang for my buck with yahoo than any other ppc campaign, and believe I’ve run campaigns on just about every SE out there large or small. When I started out I was one of those people who thought I needed to show my ad to everyone that I possibly could, the result: I trimmed my keyword list down from 350 keyword phrases to 35. I found that many keywords got me a lot of cheaper clicks, but it took so many more clicks to turn into a conversion, that I was paying way too much for a conversion. It’s better to pay $5.00 per click with a 25% conversion rate, than to pay $1.00 per click with a 3% conversion rate.

I also learned the hard way that I don’t have to be in the number 1 position. I’m a small business. My advertising budget is limited. If all I have to spend for a week is $1,000.00, why be in the number 1 slot, when I can still max out my $1k budget in the number 4 or 7 slots. I get a lot more clicks this way. I could never afford to buy all the clicks yahoo could provide, so why try.

These are just a couple of things I’ve learned. Hope it helps someone.
16. Brad | October 16th, 2008 at 5:15 pm

To the folks complaining about the mysterious high bids draining your account.

For what it’s worth it’s happened to me several times over the years. You’ll set a bid at 10 cents, save it and it’s $10. I’ve seen it numerous times and it’s not a typo problem. It’s a javascript problem in my experience. I’ve even saved bids and they were correct, logged off and then logged back on and they were $10 or $12. They’ve got some real problems with their system.

Another thing you’ve got to watch for is that they have very poor control over the max daily budget. I’ve had campaigns with a $10/day max and it’s spent $250! They say it’s not their fault, that it’s my fault for making the bid prices too high. I replied that google and msn don’t have those problems so it’s obviously a problem with the yahoo system.

They’ve refunded me a couple of times for these errors but a couple of times they didn’t and I was just screwed out of a few hundred dollars.

YSM is improving in some ways but they’ve still got a ways to go. And their new minumum bids are completely outrageous. Even higher that google amazingly.
17. The Unit | October 16th, 2008 at 5:15 pm

I truly feel that I am getting the best bang for my buck with YSM. Some of keyword bids on YSM are a LOT cheaper than Google. As an online retailer you are at Google’s mercy since they are the most used search engine and you have to advertise with them an put up with the higher costs per click due to this fact. YSM is no slouch and I wish that some of my ads did as good in Google as they do in Yahoo.
18. xpunch.com | October 17th, 2008 at 1:51 am

I’ve found Yahoo to be cheaper. Marketing is a lot of work and requires daily adjustment and testing. A company that wanted to could probably dedicate a person to this on a full-time basis.
19. Clyde B. | October 17th, 2008 at 6:19 am

Regarding the above heading Content: I think that advertisers with big budgets are cut slack that small-timers aren’t. We keep hearing about relevant, original content, don’t do this, don’t do that, do this, do that, and yet sites that are merely a collection of pass-through links and have no credibility, and you know who I mean, compete directly with high-credibility sites for I think the above reason. I had to go through a wrestling match for a keyword that I clearly market and my affiliate sells when sites like the former come up when that keyword is searched. I do like the Yahoo ad process though overall more than Google.
20. Frances | October 17th, 2008 at 7:21 am

Oh my…….. raising the rates during the holiday time is a MEAN trick, YAHOO!

Us small businesses are barely making it already in this down economy, now to kick us where it hurts, is just down right cruel. Where are the bennefits for being a loyal customer anyway? You should offer more to those have been sticking it out with you through thick & thin.
21. Sheree | October 17th, 2008 at 11:26 am

I certainly don’t know as much as the previous writers, but, I do know that if you have any problems you can actually speak to someone at Yahoo. Their Customer Service is EXCELLENT. Now for Google-Try getting an answer to a problem from them. I use both and I find that I am more comfortable making mistakes at Yahoo, they can be fixed right away, but with Google they could go unnoticed until you have to pay the bill. I am just learning all of this and I probably shouldn’t say anything, but, I had to commend Yahoo for their EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE, in my opinion it is worth the extra!
22. Ted | October 19th, 2008 at 8:43 am

Raising our PPC at christmas time is just wrong. We are thinking about suppending our account till after the holidays.We sell refrigerator water filters and i dont know anybody getting one as a gift!
23. Don Brown | February 23rd, 2009 at 7:42 am

Hi, after one day of being with YSM, I have been locked out of my account and have not been granted access to any of them. Please Help! They did this right after they took my money!