Archive for October, 2008

Podcast: Choosing Specific Keyword Phrases

Yahoo! shares tips on keyword management

Do you like to listen to good advice, instead of just reading it? Whether you’re a seasoned search marketing expert or just starting out with your Sponsored Search campaign, a new free podcast provides useful info that can help you reach your business goals.

Our own Patrizio Spagnoletto, Senior Director of Marketing here at Yahoo!, recently talked with Lon Safko, one of the authors of the “The Social Media Bible,” to discuss some helpful tactics when you’re selecting and managing keywords.

In the podcast, Patrizio talks about the basics of search marketing.  He discusses how to create multiple keyword campaigns, and says that more specific phrases, with two or three keywords, can help you reach a more specific customer.

You can find the podcast with Patrizio and Lon here.

– The Team

Gotham Get-Together

Join Yahoo! at the upcoming ad:tech conference in New York City—with a 20% discount

The interactive marketing and technology conference ad:tech is held at sites all over the globe—London, Shanghai and Sydney, to name just a few—but if you’re a blog reader in the northeastern U.S., there’s one coming up in your own backyard. The New York edition of ad:tech will be held November 3-6 at the New York Hilton in Manhattan, and as a reader of the YSM blog you can save 20% on a full conference pass.

Ad:tech is an interactive advertising and technology conference and exhibition that offers keynote speakers, topic-driven panels and workshops, giving attendees the tools and techniques they need to compete in a changing world.

Yahoo! will exhibit at ad:tech at Booth #125, and we invite you to pay us a visit to see demos of some of the slick products and services we’ve recently launched. Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers attending the conference are also invited to receive a free 30-minute account optimization session with a Yahoo! Search Marketing Content Specialist, to help you drive more traffic, increase conversions or build brand awareness.

The ad:tech conference also features a great lineup of informative speakers, and Yahoo! is contributing some of its brightest minds to this endeavor, as well. Scheduled Yahoo! speakers include:
• Michael Bayle, Senior Director, Global Mobile Advertising
• Rebecca Paoletti, Director, Video Strategy
• Hal Trencher, VP National Sales, Sports and Music
• Bill Wise, Head of Business Development

You can register for ad:tech here. Use the discount code BRNYZ9 to receive a 20% discount on a full conference pass. Expo Hall passes, which include the keynote speeches, cost only $35 when you register on or before November 2.

— Jeff Hecox

You Can See Them From Here

Now you can geo-target users at country, city or ZIP code level 

Where are your people? And more importantly, are they finding you?  Knowing your ads show up for the right people in the right places is crucial, especially when your business only caters to a specific area. You may already be familiar with geo-targeting, but now there are new ways to customize your targeting, whether you’re reaching  for the whole country or want to pinpoint a city or ZIP code.

Geo-targeting is a clever little feature that can analyze a user’s search query, their Internet Protocol (IP) address and other user information to determine where they are and what ads to serve to them. For example, if you select Portland as a geo-targeted region for the sale of your product, searchers with an IP address in Portland will be served your ad. If you’re a Portland business, you’re likely to get more relevant clicks that can lead to more sales. Our new updates give you the chance for even more relevant clicks.

Coast to coast
While geo-targeting is usually seen as limiting your area to fewer clicks, one new geo-targeting feature can actually bring you more traffic. If you were trying to reach United States customers before, your choices were either to select the entire market — both the U.S. and Canada — or individually select each of the 50 states. (Oh, and the District of Columbia. How could I forget you, D.C.?)

Not only is that a pain, but selecting individual states can leave traffic out. There is a good number of Internet users whose IP addresses suggest they are located within the U.S., but are not easy to pinpoint to individual states you’ve selected. Since geo-targeting is designed to show your ads to users our system recognizes as located within your geo-targeted areas, in the old system those users might not have seen your ad.

Getting local
Up until recently, the geo-targeting functionality was built around Designated Marketing Area (DMA), regions determined by Nielson Media Research, Inc. (yes, the Nielson group who conducts the TV ratings surveys). However, some advertisers need even more focus, especially in more populous regions. Yahoo! now lets you zoom in on targeted  cities and, in a beta feature, ZIP codes as well.

You will find geo-targeting when you sign up for your account online, but you may go back in and change your scope at any time. To do this, select “Geo-Targeting” under your Campaigns tab in your account.:

- Click the “Campaigns” tab.
- Choose a campaign.
- Click the “Campaign Settings” drop-down located in the upper right-hand corner (above the graph).
- Select “Geo-Targeting.”

From there you can use the pulldown to select your target area by Entire Market, Country, State/Province, DMA , City or ZIP code. A map will provide a visual of the areas you are selecting.

To narrow your scope further, try our ZIP code feature, currently in beta. First, select ZIP/Postal Code from the pulldown. From here you may type in the ZIP codes of the areas you want to serve, and use the Search button to confirm where the ZIP codes you’ve selected are located. You can also use the dynamic map to zoom in and out and find more ZIP codes within your area if you don’t know them all offhand.

How tight is too tight?
Keep in mind the more you target, the fewer users your ads may reach. Generally, you’re trading relevancy for volume, narrowing your target to a specific audience rather than every potential eyeball in the overall market. For example, if you service a small area and only choose five ZIP codes, you are likely to receive a limited number of clicks from people in those targeted areas who are searching for your products. We recommend choosing a minimum of 10 ZIP codes to broaden your scope.

You can also opt not to use geo-targeting by de-selecting all geo-targeting settings within your account, and your ads will be eligible for display to the entire U.S./Canada market. This may work for those who will ship products anywhere or who want to utilize the ability to get their brand name in front of as many users as possible.

Our new geo-targeting system is designed to help you hit the bullseye with your ads every time!

—Kastle Waserman, Communications Manager

Scaring Up Clicks

Some Sponsored Search tricks for you—our treat

Halloween is a fun time for young and old, and when it comes to spending, consumers don’t disappoint. According to a study conducted by the National Retail Federation, Halloween spending was expected to reach $5.07 billion in 2007—a good part of that, as we told you recently, on costumes. But other sites catering to ghouls should keep some basic tips in mind.

Candy retailers
Sites that sell candy should avoid using unfamiliar abbreviations of candy brand names (i.e., “tootsies” instead of “Tootsie Rolls”), as those could deter some users. Additionally, though candy is obviously a popular Halloween treat, candy keywords are not heavily searched during the Halloween season. This may be because consumers prefer to purchase their candy closer to Halloween Night and don’t want to rely on the timing of mail order, or because it’s simply easier to purchase candy locally. Either way, advertisers that sell candy may not want to spend a great deal of time focusing on candy-specific Halloween campaigns or ads.

Halloween attractions
Sites offering local events such as haunted houses or amusement parks with Halloween themes should consider creating geo-targeted campaigns for their non-location-specific Halloween keywords. This will display their ads to searchers in their specific geographic location, making them more accessible to local searchers.

As always, the standard best practices still apply: Make your titles and descriptions highly relevant to the offering, make sure to include your keyword in the ad copy, be sure to call out any competitive advantages you may offer (free shipping, discounts), etc. We hope these tips make your holiday retail season a little less scary.

— Noah Belson, Content Quality Analyst

Photo courtesy of Greg Dunham via Flickr and Creative Commons

Search Radio

New ads reminds users to give Yahoo! Search a try

We’ve worked really hard to make Yahoo! Search a better experience, with interesting new features (and interesting names, to boot) in the past year like SearchMonkey and Search BOSS. So, naturally, we want people to know about it.

Tens of millions of users choose Yahoo! Search every day. But, says Raj Gossain, VP of Marketing for Yahoo! Search in a blog post today, “We don’t think that’s enough. So today we’re launching an integrated, nationwide, on- and offline marketing campaign to remind the rest of the world (or at least everyone in the United States) that it’s time to give Yahoo! Search a try.”

The campaign will include radio ads and display ads like the one below.

To hear one of our radio ads, read Raj’s blog post.

– The Team

Behind the Scenes

These subtle changes are designed to lead to better Content Match performance

Sometimes a product launch is big, like our recent launch of APT from Yahoo!. And sometimes it’s understated, like the improved version of our contextual advertising product, Content Match, which we’re announcing this week. It’s not a new brand, and it looks virtually the same in the user interface. It just works better—at matching your ads with interested customers and helping you achieve better return on your ad dollars.

Better Matching for Higher Click-Through Rates
We’ve been gradually moving Content Match to a new matching technology over the past few months. The new technology not only attempts to understand what the content is on a page, but also, who is viewing it, which helps you get your ad in front of the right customer. Content Match now combines a better understanding of web page and ad content with insights from users’ geographic and behavioral profiles.

This combination can lead to more relevant clicks. Since we started rolling out the new technology, we’ve generally seen increases in Content Match click-through rates—and some advertisers have seen those rates climb appreciably. What it does for you can depend on a lot of things, including the keywords you select, the ads you write, and the settings you choose.

Improved? Ask these Advertisers
Results matter for Bankrate.com, which provides financial services to consumers. A long-time customer of Yahoo! Search Marketing, Bankrate takes a very performance-driven approach to search engine marketing. The company tested Yahoo!’s improved Content Match services this past August and September, and experienced significantly increased conversions during that period. “Yahoo!’s Content Match Network refocus on quality and relevancy has improved the delivery of the right message to the right person at the right time,” says Rafael Zorrilla, Bankrate.com’s Director of Interactive Marketing.

Lulu.com, a marketplace for digital content from authors, artists and musicians, has used Yahoo! Search Marketing for more than four years to point users to its services, which include free web storefronts and social networking offerings. Lulu’s Director of Search Engine Marketing, Dan London, has used Content Match on and off for the past two years. Recently, he noticed significant improvements to the service, including appreciably lower costs of conversion.

“In the last couple of months, I noticed that targeting our users through contextual ads was improving and that we were seeing more clicks at lower costs,” he says. “Although we had spent time improving the keywords in our campaigns, we knew that there had to be something more to it. After learning that Yahoo! had made improvements to its matching technology, it’s clear that it’s been part of what has driven this overall effectiveness.”

Why Content Match?
Content Match can help you reach a wider range of traffic than you could previously reach with search alone, and can help raise your brand awareness. You can:

• Tap into the customers who visit Yahoo! and its content network for activities beside search, such as email or news.
• Gain impressions at a relatively low cost and grow your brand.
• Complement your offline and search campaigns.

Content Match has been a great service for Lulu, according to London. “Yahoo!’s Content Match has allowed us the opportunity to reach potential customers who do not turn to search engines to find what they need,” he says.

What Do I Need to Do?
The new matching technology is already running, so all you need to do is start a Content Match campaign. Because Content Match isn’t necessarily meant to target users when they are actively searching for your business, it may convert at a different rate than Sponsored Search. Keep in mind these basic guidelines when you set up your campaign:

• Create Content Match-only campaigns to manage bids and budgets separately from Sponsored Search.
• See how much you can afford, and adjust your bids as you learn the value of this traffic for you. If you add a Content Match campaign, you may need to adjust your budget accordingly.
• Write specific ads and select targeted keywords for those ads, so that the ads are more likely to appear in the type of content where you want them.

If you’ve been using Content Match, you may already be noticing a bump. If you’re not using it yet and it fits your business, it may be worth a try.

— Jeff Sweat

Have Some Email with Your Search

3 ways to use email and search together to reach your customers

You should know this from your own Web usage, but a study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project says that the most popular Web activity for Americans is email, followed closely by searching. The two lessons you should take from these findings are:

1. It makes sense to do email marketing, and
2. It makes sense to do search marketing.

After all, both online channels are perfect ways to meet customers in their natural online habitats.

But there’s a way to make your search and your email work even better. How? Use them together. Here are three suggestions as to how to do it.

1. Use Search to Make Your Email Smarter
To get a strong response to your email blasts, you need to use just the right words and just the right message. This will make your customers want to read your email and respond to it. A good place to start looking for the right kind of language is in your Sponsored Search campaigns:

• Use your best-performing search keywords within your email subject line and body copy.
• Use your best-performing search creatives as the core of your email subject lines.
• Use your best-converting search landing pages as the model for your email body and your email landing pages.

Think about it: If certain words, messages and concepts drive searchers to convert via search, then those same words, messages and concepts should resonate with similarly minded shoppers within email. So it follows that if you want to learn how to sell to your email customers, you should ask your search customers.

2. Use Email to Make Your Search Work Better
People who have signed up to your email lists are, without a doubt, great examples of who your target customers are. After all, they’ve explicitly asked you to keep in touch with them. So if you understand your email subscribers’ online behaviors, you can read the mind of your target market.

Think about the types of wording, messages, email body and landing pages those target customers respond to best, and you can get clues as to what types of keywords, ad copy and landing pages will best capture the attention (and conversions) of people like them as they use search.

And, of course, look at the keywords, ad copy and landing pages that drove those email sign-ups to begin with: They’ve clearly worked!

3. Bringing it Together
For this last point, allow me to provide a simple example:

Consider a shopper who’s bought a specific brand of pants (let’s say, Acme Pants). She’s very happy with that brand, and the next time she wants to buy a new pair of pants, she searches for “Acme Pants,” clicks on a Sponsored Search ad, and buys the item.

That’s a Sponsored Search click that’s led to a sale—and so, arguably, that’s search spend well spent.

But here’s an even better scenario: The same shopper signs up to an Acme Pants email list. The next time she needs a pair of pants, she doesn’t search at all—and so she doesn’t create any search click costs for Acme. Instead, she arrives at the Acme Pants site via the Acme email, and buys a new pair of pants directly from the manufacturer.

The moral of this tale? Use Sponsored Search to acquire new customers. Then once you have those customers in your database, help them bypass the search engines by putting them on your email lists. Offer a clear “email signup” link throughout your site, and suggest that shoppers sign up to your email list as part of the checkout process.

You can invest the money you’ll save into getting even more customers via Sponsored Search.

Looking for more ideas on combining email with search? I’d suggest searching for them—and then emailing a friend about what you find.

— Abe Mezrich, Communications Manager, Didit

Top Costumes for Fright Night

Halloween retailers: Expect a rush on these popular outfits for the holiday, and update your campaigns accordingly

On 364 nights of the year when you see a guy dressed like Dracula, you better run like heck, in case he’s the real deal. But on October 31, it’s pretty certainly just a guy in a costume, and your bodily fluids should be safe.

According to a study conducted by the National Retail Federation, the average consumer planned to spend $23.33 on Halloween costumes in 2007, with young adults making up the largest group of holiday spenders. If you are a retailer who carries Halloween goods, you’ll want to review the top costumes that consumers were clamoring for in ‘07, as well as which get-ups they’re planning to dress up in during October ‘08.

Traditional and Contemporary
In 2007, the top costume for children (or more specifically, girls) was one that’s been a favorite of female trick-or-treaters for decades: the Princess. In 2007, 10.7% of girls said they’d don a tiara last Halloween, a figure that was only slightly down from 11.8% in 2006 and 11.5% in 2005.

For boys in 2007, the top costume was everyone’s favorite web slinger, Spiderman, with 4.8% of boys surveyed saying they were planning to jump into the red and blue tights of the wall-crawler. Also topping the kids’ list in 2007 were other traditional favorites, such as pirates (4.7%) witches (4.2%) and fairies (2.8%). Some costumes inspired by movie and TC characters also made the must-have list, including Darth Vader, Optimus Prime, Hannah Montana and Harry Potter.

Of course, Halloween is no longer just a holiday for kids. Fully a third (33.8%) of adults interviewed in 2007 said they planned to dress up for Halloween, and they had targeted a wide variety of costumes, led by traditional favorites such as witches (16.9%), pirates (3.8%), vampires (3.1%), cats (2.5%) and princesses (2.2%). Other favorites included characters from “Star Wars” (1.2%), athletes (1.0%) and doctors (0.9%).

Even pets got into the spirit of Halloween in 2007, with more than one in ten human celebrants (11.0%), or 7.4 million households, planning on dressing their furry friends in some sort of costume. Devils (12.0%) and pumpkins (9.2%) topped the list of pet costumes in 2007, with witches (4.5%), princesses (3.8%) and angels (3.3%) rounding out the top five.

Looking Ahead to 10/31/2008
In 2008, we expect that the popular favorites of years past will once again make appearances, so plan on seeing plenty of princesses, pirates, witches and ghosts pounding the pavement in the quest for sweets this Halloween. Of course, every year offers new hot costumes for kids, and 2008 is no exception. The popularity of “The Dark Knight” movie has created a huge demand for both Batman and Joker costumes. Additionally, you can expect Iron Man costumes to shine and Incredible Hulk costumes to be a smash with kids this Halloween.

For adults, 2008’s hottest Halloween looks may be torn from the headlines, with Barack Obama, John McCain and Hillary Clinton being likely costume candidates. You can also expect old favorites like the athlete, monster and movie character costumes for men, and witch, fairy and sexy devil costumes for women, to be in high demand.

As consumer costume sales continue their climb, retailers can look forward to a frighteningly good Halloween season in 2008. Whether you sell costumes or just other Halloween items, now’s the time to review your holiday campaigns and get you keyword lists in order.

Have a safe and happy Halloween: May your candy bag be free of apples and popcorn balls, and your website full of new visitors!

— Noah Belson, Content Quality Analyst

Search by the Slice

Yahoo! on search panels at SMX East in New York City

New York, New York: the town so nice we went there twice. Yep, after just launching APT from Yahoo! at Ad Week in New York City, we’ll be back there next week for SMX East. Whether it’s learning the latest search marketing techniques at the conference or eating the biggest slice of pizza you’ve ever seen in my old hood, the city is always worth the trip.

Grab a slice and head over to the Javitz Convention Center for the conference. A couple of Yahoo!s will be representing us in the search marketing world. For people on our search team, read the Yahoo! Search Blog’s post.

Tuesday, October 7th
Time: 10:15am-11:00am
Session: Search & Branding 
Description: This panel looks at how searching by brand differs from those searching for generic products, and how branding supports search.
Yahoo!: Theresa LaMontagne, Research Director, Sales & Media

Time: 12:15pm-1:45pm 
Session: Search & Branding 
Description: How do display ads reinforce search ads, and vice versa? 
Yahoo!: Theresa LaMontagne, Research Director, Sales & Media

Wednesday, October 8th
Time: 2:30pm-3:30pm 
Session: Ask The Paid Search Reps
Description: This session is your chance to ask paid search questions of representatives from Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google.
Yahoo!: Ron Belanger, Vice President of Agency Development

 – Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

Straight From the Source

New site gives you information on the Yahoo!-Google deal

It’s a pretty good guess you’ve heard opinions on the Yahoo!-Google marketing agreement from just about everybody: your coworkers, your competitors, your daily blog, and — who knows? — maybe even your taxi driver. Which is why we thought we could help you sift through the clutter to the facts.

This week we launched the Yahoo! Search Agreement site, which will help you find out what you need to know about the commercial arrangement announced by Yahoo! and Google in June. We hope the information archived on this site will help visitors understand why the agreement with Google will make Yahoo! a stronger competitor in online advertising and will benefit advertisers, publishers and end users.

Among the items you’ll find there is a blog post from our President, Sue Decker, that busts some myths about the agreement. For example, Sue writes,

[The agreement is] simply a contract that gives Yahoo! the right, but no obligation, to show Google AdSense ads on Yahoo!’s own network. It’s important to note that the agreement is non-exclusive and gives us the option to “backfill” with Google ads if and when we see fit.

You can also view more details of the deal on the site, as well as frequently asked questions and press coverage. With the facts in hand — unfiltered by your workout buddies — we hope you’ll discover how the arrangement might benefit you.

– The Team