Archive for April, 2009

Serious Analytics

Yahoo! Web Analytics now available for search and display advertisers

If you’re an advertiser in need of some serious analytics, you’ve probably been watching for our Yahoo! Web Analytics enterprise tool—and you’ll be glad to know that it’s now available for free to search and display advertisers supported by a Yahoo! account team. 

If you haven’t been watching for it, you may wonder why you should care. “Yahoo!’s emerging Web Analytics service surpasses Google in several key categories relevant to enterprises,” says a recent report from independent analyst firm CMS Watch. Search advertisers can use Yahoo! Web Analytics to track performance of their campaigns—not just Yahoo! Search Marketing, but campaigns on other search engines, display campaigns, even email campaigns—from click to conversion.

Yahoo! Web Analytics offers user insight that you’re not likely to find in other free analytics tools, including demographic and behavioral insight on your website visitors, near-real-time reporting, and visibility into as many as 50 different types of actions that take place on your site.

Here are some of the questions that Yahoo! Web Analytics can help advertisers and agencies answer:

How am I performing?  
Yahoo! Web Analytics gives you customizable reports, dashboards, alerts and segmentation tools that let you slice up data to figure out what’s working, and what isn’t. You can identify opportunities to improve ads, campaigns, keyword bids and website design. 

Who are my audiences?
This new version helps you take advantage of our recent demographic targeting options by helping you identify the age, gender, city, and online interests—and finding out who your most valuable audience is so that you can reach more of it.

How can I improve engagement and conversions? 
It’s one thing to get people to your site—but what you really want is to keep them there and buying your products or services. This new version of Yahoo! Web Analytics can track up to 15 steps of your conversion process to see where you’re most liable to lose someone.

The new version is available for any of our advertisers who work with an account manager, but it’s most suited for large advertisers with complex analytical needs and the resources to set up and manage analytics.

If you think it is the right tool for you, contact your account manager to get started.  Visit our website for more information. If you’re not quite ready or aren’t eligible for Yahoo! Web Analytics, look into our Full Analytics or Conversion Only Analytics in our Sponsored Search user interface.

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

Scoping Out Your Keywords

Your keyword list should range from general to specific

When you were a kid, did your mom ever send you to the store with a list of things to buy? You may not have known it at the time, but that could have been your first introduction to the concept of scope (no, not the mouthwash—even if it was on your list).

Mom’s list may have confused you if she wasn’t specific enough about what she wrote down. Simply writing “tea” was fine, if the store sold only one kind of tea. On the other hand, if they offered caffeinated, decaffeinated, green and a hundred different flavored teas, that would leave a young errand runner mighty confused.

How “scope” applies to search advertising
This same concept can apply to the keywords in your account. Some of your keywords may be narrow in scope (like “green tea”) while others may be broad (like just plain “tea”). Both types of keywords are potentially valuable, as some customers know exactly what they’re looking for, while others may only have a general idea of what they want.

Skip the narrow keywords, and you risk turning off users who already know what they need. Leave out the broad keywords, and you’ll lose the shoppers who haven’t quite decided what they want just yet.

The solution? Have a healthy number of both broad and narrow keywords in your account, to make your ads appeal to whichever kind of consumer happens to be searching for them.

Finding the perfect mix
Finding broad keywords is usually pretty simple, since they just describe what you sell. For example, a Toyota dealer’s broad keywords would be “toyota,” “new toyota,” “toyota car,” etc.

Narrow keywords get a little more specific. They don’t describe what, so much as which, meaning which types of things you sell. That same Toyota dealer’s narrow keywords might be things like “toyota camry,” “toyota prius,” “toyota corolla,” etc. These are the keywords used by people who already know what they’re looking for—so use them to make sure they’ll find you.

On the whole, you’re probably going to use a lot more narrow keywords than broad keywords, because there are just so many more possibilities for narrow keywords. From specific brand names and model numbers to slang or industry terms used to refer to your products, the list of potential narrow keywords is usually long and plentiful. By including as many as you feel are viable, you’re increasing your chances of attracting users who are searching on those keywords.

At the same time your broad keywords will display your ads to those who are still at the start of their buying journey, and with a little luck, that journey will end at your site.

So when you’re selecting your keywords, be sure to keep scope in mind. A good mixture of broad and narrow helps you cast the widest possible net, to appeal to biggest possible audience. And even if all they have is a list from mom, if you’ve mastered scope—you’ll be more than ready.

— Colin Kingston, Listing Editor

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jungle Jim’s International Markets

You’re Doing it Wrong

5 common mistakes that can hurt your ads’ performance

No one likes to be told they’re doing something wrong. And most of the time we try to focus this blog on the positive changes you can enact to help your account run better. But our Advertiser Solutions team sees advertisers make the same mistakes over and over when they set up their accounts, and so in this post we’d like to review the top five—just to make sure you’re not making them, too.

1. Using geo-modified keywords in geo-targeted campaigns 
This can result in a lot less traffic, since there is a strong chance the ads will not display due to a “geo-targeting mismatch.” One solution for this: use geo-modified keywords only in campaigns not using geo-targeting. To know when to use geo-targeting and when to use geo-modified keywords, read our post, “Geo vs. Geo.”

2. Duplicating keywords across ad groups or campaigns 
When you have a good keyword, it may seem like a smart move to spread the goodness around to all of your ad groups and campaigns. However, duplicate keywords won’t help your performance—in  fact, they can hurt you quite a bit, because our systems de-dupe on multiple levels. (That’s a fancy way of saying it looks for duplicates and removes them.)

For example, if you want to test Advanced and Standard match types by running both concurrently in identical ad groups, your keywords will compete against each other and drive up your cost-per-click. We’ve also seen advertisers duplicate keywords with multiple landing pages. The duplicated keywords can result in a lower quality index score and a higher cost-per-click.

3. Jumping the gun 
“All we are saying, is give bids a chance.” Many times, we’ve seen advertisers make bid adjustments, or pause or delete keywords well before enough data has been collected to make an educated decision. For example, your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) target might be $40, and because you think your keyword isn’t giving you enough impressions or clicks, you pause it. Our experience has shown that many advertisers do this too quickly. A good rule of thumb is that if you haven’t reached your $40—or whatever the amount was you set for your target—it’s too early to judge your metrics.

4. Putting your phone number in your ad 
This one may sound odd—why wouldn’t you want to give your prospects another way to contact you? However, a phone number in your ad can decrease your click-through rate and quality index score, which in turn drives up your cost-per-click and pushes the ad further down in results. With search advertising, you want people to click your ad. That’s the way to get them to your website, and ultimately convert. It’s also the way to improve your quality score and get all the benefits that come with that.

5. Bidding on competitor’s keywords
Nope, it’s not OK to see what your competitor is using and then simply copy them. Doing this will result in your irrelevant keywords being removed by our guidelines review team, and could have legal consequences, as well.

So, do any of these mistakes seem familiar? Fortunately, they’re not too tough to fix. If you run into trouble, just contact us—the Advertiser Solutions team is here to help you with your questions, troubleshooting, and optimizing your account.

— Kastle Waserman, Communications Manager, Advertiser Solutions

Mom’s the Word

Clean your room, eat your peas and make sure your ads are ready for Mother’s Day

There are three things in life you’d better not forget: your wedding anniversary, where you parked your car and most importantly, Mother’s Day. The data suggest that not too many consumers do forget mom: According to the National Retail Federation’s annual Mother’s Day survey, Americans will spend an average of $123.89 per person on Mother’s Day in 2009, compared to last year’s $138.63. Total Mother’s Day spending is expected to reach $14.1 billion, just slightly more than Easter.

To catch the eye of Mother’s Day shoppers, make sure your ads are “clean behind the ears” before we get too close to May 10. To that end, the tips below can serve as your virtual washcloth:

• If you sell jewelry but also buy or repair it, be sure to be put the emphasis on sales in your ads. Consumers searching on keywords like “mom jewelry” are almost certainly looking to buy, rather than sell.
• Personalization and customization have strong appeal to consumers—be sure to mention it in your ads if you offer it.
• Promoting same-day or next-day delivery tends to put flower delivery ads over the top. Even shoppers who haven’t waited until the last minute seem to find quick delivery appealing, so if you offer that, be sure to let your customers know.
• Ads for broad keywords don’t usually perform well when the results are too narrow. For example, if the keyword “buy magazines” leads to a site that only sells beauty magazines, users will almost certainly be deterred. A good rule of thumb is that if the keyword is general, the result should be, as well.
• Avoid writing ads that clash with your keywords, like one that touts great deals on Father’s Day items but shows up when a user searches on “mother’s day.” Conflicts like that are confusing for users and may cause them to pass over your ad rather than try to decipher it.
• As always, if you offer any promotions (free shipping, discount codes, etc.) be sure to call them out in your ads. Now more than ever, consumers are looking for ways to save money, so letting them know what deals you offer is a really good idea.
• Sites that don’t serve a national audience (such as local florists or gift basket delivery services) should create geo-targeted campaigns for their non-location-specific keywords; i.e., “flower delivery.” Geo-targeted campaigns serve up results to users who are specifically within the area of the business, which gives you much more targeted traffic than if you were to display those ads nationally.
• Remember to write direct, concise titles and descriptions that clearly explain what you offer and make the best possible use of the space allotted. Use “alt text” to ensure that the inserted keyword appears in the ad the way you’d like it to, to replace keywords that are too long, or for purposely misspelled queries.

By putting these ideas into action, you’ll have a better chance of hooking consumers who want to cater to their mater this May. Happy Mother’s Day (in advance) to all the moms who read the YSM blog!

— Noah Belson, Content Quality Analyst

What Do You Want to Hear?

Your chance to tell us the advertising topics you’d like us to cover

Ask my wife—I generally don’t like being told what to do. The only time we really fight is when I’m working on a project in which she gives me, shall we say, unsolicited direction. But I actually like solicited advice, and I like making this blog better. Which is why I’m asking you: What do you want us to write about?

Before you answer that, here are the types of things we think about when we’re picking blog topics. 

Product features 
You might not think there’s much that you can add to our product coverage, since we write about updates as they happen. But you can tell us the details that you want to know about new updates. And, more importantly, you can ask us about existing product features that you want to use better or just plain don’t understand.

Search marketing tips
We try to write a lot of these, whether it’s how to clean up your account, or what practices you should use for a seasonal campaign. But is there anything we’ve left out? Maybe there are secrets of search marketing that you have yet to master, or you don’t know what to do for your Arbor Day ads.

Other advertising tools
We know that search marketing is probably not the only type of marketing that your company does. What other kinds of marketing would you like to hear about, especially as they relate to search? Do you want to know more about using display ads? Other Yahoo! products?

Before you start typing, you should probably know that we’re not going to be able to write posts that provide a sneak peek into our product roadmap, or things like that. But if you have ideas that can help our readers become better marketers, just leave a comment below, and we’ll try to turn them into search marketing magic.

  —Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Duchamp.

Those Who Matter Most

Finding your favorite customers is easier now with demographic targeting

You know your audience — especially those whose clicks are likely to convert. This is the driving force behind the recent launch of our demographic targeting.

Demographic bidding (also known as targeting) allows you to take advantage of the knowledge you already have about your audience and focus your spending on specific age range and gender segments. Demographic bidding is available for both Sponsored Search and Content Match in both the user interface and through our APIs.

Want to increase the likelihood that your ad is in a premium position for men in their 40s? Or perhaps your particular product is geared more toward women in their mid-to-late 30s?  In either case, now you can simply increase your ad group or keyword bid for a particular group with a bid adjustment.  When a user who matches your specified age group and/or gender performs a search on one of your keywords, your ad will have a higher tendency to show up toward the top of the page because of your increased bid.

At the same time, using bid adjustments on your desired demo groups doesn’t mean you’ll have to give up traffic from other groups. For age ranges and/or genders where you don’t adjust your bid, our systems will match your ad just as they do today to determine how and when to show your ad for searches.

Why use demographic targeting
Thinking through the groups you want to target, and adding the appropriate bid adjustments, will require a little bit of account management time initially. But targeting demographically can translate to an improved return on investment when your ads become more visible to users who fit your target prospect profile. These are the prospective customers who are probably more interested in what you’re offering, and are more likely to convert. That will give you more of a competitive edge.

If you aren’t yet sure which age ranges or gender react best to your product, you can use demographic reporting to learn which groups are clicking more on your ads.  For example, it might show you that women are clicking on your ads and buying your product for their spouses far more often than the men you’ve been targeting with your ads all along.  Armed with this information, you can adjust your offers, creatives, and spending to maximize your sales and return on your advertising spend.

How to use it
You can easily activate demographic bidding for a campaign or ad group by targeting any age range or gender with a bid adjustment or by simply clicking on the “”turn on demographic bidding” checkbox where you set your demo targeting. For more details on getting started and using demographic bidding, visit our help center.

One additional thing to keep in mind: The bid adjustments that you set for various demographic groups are added together if a user matches more than one criterion. For example, if you set a bid adjustment of 15% for female prospects and 25% for ages 30 to 34, you would bid 40% (15%+25%) more than your ad group or keyword bid for a click from a 32-year-old woman.

— Malin Kennedy, Senior Manager, Traffic Quality

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Kate Mereand

Know the (Quality) Score

4 ways to improve your quality index for lower cost and better placement

Everyone wants to score an A+ when put to the test. In ad quality terms, that would be a 5 out of 5. A quality index score of 5 generally means that your ads are well-written and your keywords are working with them, they’re getting clicked on regularly, and you’re giving users what they want.

And as with that good report card you brought home to Mom, your campaign management efforts are also rewarded with lower costs for your clicks and conversions. It could substantially improve the return on your advertising spend!

Many new advertisers think that ad quality has to do with keywords, when it’s actually about the ads themselves. If you want your ad quality scores to head north, focus on how your ads are written. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to ace the test.

The write stuff
You may not be a writer by trade, but you are in business and you probably know your product better than anyone. The basic principle of marketing is to provide a product that fills a need. So focus on what makes you different from your competitors. What’s your secret weapon, your special sauce, your unique angle? It might not be the product, but the service you provide. Do you offer free shipping, great customer support or overnight delivery?

Put yourself in the shoes of your target customers and think about what their needs are—then write them down! If you’re having trouble putting it into words, Yahoo! can help you optimize your account, including assisting with ad proposals. Or consider hiring a professional freelance copywriter. The extra money you spend should come back to you in higher sales and profits.

For more tips on writing strong ads, please visit our Help Center.

What’s key
A short list of keywords for an ad group is usually better than a big, long list of anything-goes keywords. You don’t just want a bunch of traffic, you want quality traffic that can lead to conversions. Your keywords should always be relevant to their associated ads, and the best way to accomplish that is to create multiple ad groups with a small number of select keywords that are highly relevant to each other. The fewer keywords you have, the better chance you’ll have of identifying what’s working and what isn’t.

Putting keywords in their place
Research has long shown that including the user’s search term in your ad copy significantly increases the likelihood of a click, which obviously is the first step toward closing a sale. This is where our keyword insertion tool can help.

Many advertisers let this nifty little tool go unused because they think it’s complicated, but it’s actually quite easy to use. Keyword insertion can help reduce the number of ads you have to manage and increase the relevancy of ads by automatically including in your ad the keyword that matched the user’s search query. Thus, you don’t have to create an ad for every keyword—just let keyword insertion do the work for you.

We recommend that you use keyword insertion with your title rather than your description. The title is the first thing that users read (and sometimes the only thing). With just 40 characters in the title, it’s easier to make the title relevant to all of your keywords.

You can learn more about how to use keyword insertion in this section of the Help Center.

Test time
When you create more than one ad within an ad group, you’re automatically setting up ad testing. This tool gives you insight into your ad’s performance and helps you identify the messages that drive the most potential customers to your site. Find out more about ad testing here.

Then test again, and again, until your score improves. And you thought all those tests ended with school!

— Kastle Waserman, Communications Manager, Customer Solutions

Right on Schedule

How to take advantage of the new ad scheduling tools to help improve your ROI

When talking about their Tivo or another type of digital video recorder, people often say, “It’s changed my life.” That might serve as an indictment about Americans’ overindulgence with television, but at the heart of that sentiment is the powerful ability to control the timing of their TV experience, both by “time-shifting” their viewing and zipping through the commercials.

That type of time control is also at the heart of our new ad scheduling feature, which we introduced last month. Ad scheduling allows you to control the days or times in which users may see your ad, so it’s akin to the “dayparting” options long offered by traditional offline advertising. You also now have the ability to price clicks received at certain times differently than others, using bid adjustments.

To schedule or not to schedule
First you must decide whether using ad scheduling will help your business. The key thing to think about is when your business is open and closed, and when customers respond best to your advertising. When your business is closed, can you handle incoming leads? For example, can you take voicemails that you’ll respond to when you reopen?

If not, you may still find value in attracting interested customers simply to tell them more about your business (i.e., branding). In this situation, you may want to lower your bids for the “closed” hours, but still leave your campaigns active during that time.

Another consideration is that using ad scheduling may reduce your overall traffic if it is used as a filter (example: your ads are displayed nine hours per day vs. 24). To help guard against that result, you may want to use bid adjustments to increase traffic for your strongest times of day or days of week.

If you’ve made the decision to try ad scheduling, you can pick the times at which users may see your ads in two different ways:

Audience Time Zone targeting
The first ad scheduling option, Audience Time Zone, allows you to set a range of time for which all users are eligible to see your ads (subject to geo-targeting and other filters, of course). This time period will be consistent across all time zones. For example, if you set an Audience Time Zone target of 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., search users in the Pacific time zone could see your ads between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Pacific time, while users in the Eastern time zone could see your ads between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Eastern time.

Some of our largest competitors do not offer this capability, which could be useful to businesses that are open around the clock (like a fully automated website), or businesses that span multiple time zones. Conversely, if you’re using geo-targeting to only reach prospects in a small area (that is contained within a single time zone), there’s no need to target by audience time zone.

Account Time Zone targeting
The second option, Account Time Zone, allows you to set an absolute time period during which users may see your ads. So, if your account is based on the Pacific time zone and you set a 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. range, your ads could be seen between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Pacific time and between 11:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. Eastern time.

This option would be useful to businesses that have a set number of hours in the day during which new orders can be taken. Another way to use the Account Time Zone option is if you want to target a specific live event during the time it’s occurring, like the Super Bowl.

Even if you don’t think you have a need for ad scheduling based on the above scenarios, you may want to test it solely for increasing your return-on-ad-spend (ROAS). If you choose this strategy, be sure to use the conversion-tracking tools in your account and check your reports frequently. If you find that one time period performs better than others, think about using bid adjustments to try to win more of that traffic.

— Jeff Hecox and the Product Management Team

Eggs-cellent Advice

Sweet ideas to consider as you scramble to get ready for Easter

When I was a kid, my father used to say “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” (along with several other highly clichéd expressions). I agreed with him, unless of course we were talking about an Easter basket. As kids (and a few adults like me) are now gearing up for their favorite spring holiday, this is a good time to share a few best practices with advertisers who sell Easter-related products and services:

Easter-specific campaigns
If you sell candy or flowers or anything else commonly associated with Easter, it’s a good idea to create distinct “Easter” campaigns. This makes it easier to manage ads and keywords that focus solely on the holiday.

After all, when users search with highly specific Easter keywords, it’s a good idea to return results that are equally specific. This is doubly true with something like flowers: If users type in “Easter flowers” and see an ad for funeral flowers, they’re going to be a bit put off. Advertisers looking to cash in on this biggest of Spring holidays are better off using unique campaigns with unique ads, rather than trying to make their existing ads accommodate holiday keywords.

Double-check your ads
It seems obvious, but it’s worth a few minutes to make sure that your ads correspond to the right holiday. If the search term “easter basket” delivers an ad that sings the praises of your Valentine’s Day gift baskets, you can count on a click-through rate of zero-point-zero. Ads that try to squeeze in a couple of holiday references—”Check out our deals on chocolate Santas and Easter bunnies”—will likely turn off users who are looking for info on one holiday or the other. If the keyword is specific only to Easter, the ad should be as well.

You can’t include the keyword too much
While using keyword insertion is important, sometimes it’s just not enough. Giving your keywords prominent placement in your ads really helps, as well. For example, if a user uses the search term “chocolate bunny,” an ad that’s primarily focused on those delicious rabbits is probably going to catch her eye quicker than one in which “chocolate bunny” is simply inserted along with several other items. Caution: If you do this, make sure your ad accommodates your keyword, rather than other way around.

Emphasize your money-makers
If you sell chocolate but also offer recipes or other info on your site, make sure that your ads focus on what you sell, rather than what you give away. While it’s great to give users added reasons to visit your site, you’ll want to put the emphasis on making a sale. Mention your extras if there’s room, but skip them if they take up ad characters that could be used for selling.

Why skimp?
Make the most of the ad space you’re given. An ad description that simply reads “We sell Easter candy” does spell out what’s being offered, but as descriptions can have as many as 70 characters, you’re wasting an opportunity to make a stronger pitch. If you have extra room, build out your titles and descriptions to fill them with as much info as possible. Adding certain appealing words and phrases (”delicious,” “low price”) can juice up your ad copy.

Easter-related searches have been spiking since March 28, so it’s time to hop to it and get your holiday ads in shape before the big bunny passes you by.

— Noah Belson, Content Quality Analyst