Spring Cleaning

5 things you should tidy up to improve account performance

Remember when you were a kid and your mom would ask you how you could find anything in your pig sty of a room? Well, your Yahoo! Search Marketing Account is a lot like your bedroom: the more organized and structured it is, the easier it is to work with.

Not to be a nag, but here are a few suggestions on how to keep your account clean:

Account structure
Your account structure should resemble your web site structure. For example, a shoe retailer would have a separate page for every type of shoe it sells — sneakers, dress shoes, sandals — and it should also have a separate Sponsored Search campaign for each type of shoe.

Creating distinct campaigns for each type of item you sell makes it easier to manage and maintain your account. Then you can further break down your offerings in ad group, in a way that also resembles your web site. This helps differentiate ad groups, and makes them easier to organize and edit. If the shoe site suddenly decides to stop selling Puma sneakers, its can simply turn off its “Puma” ad group, instead of needing to search for every Puma keyword in the account.

Keeping ad groups small and distinct makes the ads in each ad group much more relevant, since they only need to support a small number of related keywords.

Limiting keywords
Keep your ad groups manageable by not overloading them with keywords. Start with fewer than 20 keywords per ad group, and only add more when needed. We recommend limiting ad groups to no more than 50 keywords to keep them tight and easy to manage.

Site relevance
Only bid on keywords that are related to your site’s products or services. For example, if you only sell baseball cards, don’t bid on keywords related to football cards. It’s a lose/lose situation: You’ll wind up spending money paying for clicks from users who won’t be buying from you, because you aren’t selling what they’re looking for. You may also anger what could be a potential future customer, which is never a good idea.

Ad quality
This may sound obvious, but check your ads for proper spelling and punctuation, as well as for proper upper/lower case use in your title and descriptions. You’d be surprised at how many advertisers fail to do this. Proofreading your ads will give them the highest possible quality, and it may also give you an edge over advertisers who don’t.

Duplicate keywords
Putting the same keyword into multiple ad groups is permitted (and may make sense for you, if you have different targeting criteria), but do this sparingly lest you start competing against yourself. Our systems won’t display multiple ads from the same company on the same search results page.

So, don’t be like this guy. Keep your campaigns neat and manageable. And when you’re done with that, you can get busy on cleaning up your room. Think how happy it’ll make your mom!

— Noah Belson, Content Quality Analyst

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Joe Dykes