Archive for June, 2009

Counting Clicks

Yahoo! click processes comply with new IAB click measurement guidelines

If it talks like a click, walks like a click and looks like a click—it must be a click.

Or is it?

For many online advertisers, the business of measuring clicks can be frustrating. And since Sponsored Search bills advertisers for any valid clicks they receive, this “counting business” is just as important to us as it is to you.

To improve this experience for advertisers, and to help foster trust within the online advertising space, Yahoo!—along with a slew of other companies—has been working with the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) to develop and publish a set of click measurement guidelines. These were released last month, and today Yahoo! is announcing that it has received certification that its click measurement processes and policies comply with these guidelines.

How does this affect me?
This certification should help you know you’re getting what you’re paying for. When you purchase a product, any product, chances are you leave the store with something in your hand. But clicks from online advertising are a lot less tangible, and the IAB guidelines are designed to provide objective standards around how clicks are measured and counted.

The IAB guidelines can be summarized in two points:

1. They provide definition around the way businesses measure and count valid and invalid clicks.
2. They call for more transparency for online advertisers, so they can feel more comfortable knowing that they are, in fact, getting what they pay for.

If you’re already familiar with Yahoo!’s traffic quality processes, then you know that we’ve had a sophisticated click counting system in place for years. But now you don’t have to take our word for it.

—Malin Kennedy, Senior Manager, Advertiser Experience

Social Chemistry

Marketing strategies from the Social Networking Conference

Good social media marketing always blurs the lines a bit between the personal and the professional. But the lines seemed extra blurry at the Social Networking Conference we attended in Los Angeles which, it turns out, is also the iDate 2009 Internet Dating Conference.

Never mind the discomfort of submitting an expense report receipt that says “Internet Dating” on it. When my wife found out the iDate conference was there, she said, very drily, “Oh? And were you planning on stopping by to pick up some tips?”

No, not dating tips. But the Social Networking Conference part of the event had some pretty useful marketing tips  for businesses trying to augment their traditional advertising techniques through video, forums, and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Intel social media strategist Michael Brito, a former Yahoo, said that for any company to successfully build a social network, they have to be believable and trustworthy. That means being transparent in your communications, admitting mistakes when you make them, and listening to and acting upon customer feedback. And you have to give communities some time to grow. “Don’t make monetization your only priority,” he said. “It’ll happen naturally if done right.”

Clara Shih, author of The Facebook Era, talked about using Facebook and Twitter in business. Clara had, until recently, worked for salesforce.com, the customer relationship-management (CRM) company. In her mind, “Facebook is CRM for individuals. It gives us one place to manage our relationships with all of our contacts.”  Social networking should make marketers look more closely  at a customer’s lifetime value, she said—while a customer may not have that much individual spending power, he may have an extensive network whose buying decisions he can influence.

Social media is about storytelling, said Angela LoSasso, U.S. social media and social networking manager at Hewlett-Packard, and “storytelling is an integral part of your daily life.” So she tries to get customers and employees telling stories about her company’s products. HP tries to make its 300,000 employees brand ambassadors by presences on blogs, Twitter, or forums. “Friends” in social networks are important, she said, because they are people we trust to help us make decisions. If someone is excited about your product, they’re going to tell their friends about it. You just have to make it easy for them to do so.

The social networking and Internet dating events did occasionally cross over. We ate lunch with the president of ScientificMatch.com, which matches people based on DNA tests. Our unique odors are hard-coded to our DNA, he said, and we tend to be attracted by smell to those who offer more genetic variety and immunity to disease, increasing the health of our children. “Stop using deodorant,” he said, “you’re ruining the chemistry!” And we wondered briefly if we had attended the wrong half of the conference.

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

Display for the Rest of Us

Yahoo! My Display Ads offers self-serve display ads

Display ads have not always been the friendliest form of online advertising for the little guy—you had to have hefty advertising budgets, and you had to have agencies or other creative types around to build your ads in the first place. But our new Yahoo! My Display Ads, with a lower spending minimum and do-it-yourself graphic ads, just made display advertising a lot friendlier.

Yahoo! My Display Ads, a pilot program being launched this week, puts display advertising within reach of advertisers who were previously limited to search marketing. Advertisers can upload existing  ads, or build their own from more than 700 templates. And, unlike traditional display, you can get started with as little as $30 a day.

Display for people who like search
If you’re a search advertiser, why would you want to run display ads, even if you can build them? Some search advertisers are under the impression that display doesn’t perform as well as search. But that’s not quite true—display can make your search campaigns more powerful.

Display can reach users at a different point in your sales cycle than search does—at the beginning of the purchase process, when they’re still open to multiple products, rather than further along when they’re looking for a particular product. Getting in front of someone with display ads when they’re in an open mindset can influence whether people search for you or not when they are ready to buy. According to a 2008 Specific Media study, people who saw a display ad for a product were 155% more likely to search for that product than those who didn’t.

If you want to tie your display campaign to specific performance goals, though, Yahoo! My Display Ads lets you choose from two pricing models: cost per impression (CPM), the traditional display model, or cost per click (CPC), which is more like search marketing. With a cost per click model, you’re not paying for people to look at your ad—you only pay when your ad is clicked.

Creatives for the non-creative types
Even if you don’t have a creative bone in your body, you should be able to build an ad with Yahoo! My Display Ads. You pick a display ad template for your type of business—education, consumer products, travel, and so on. If you don’t know what will work, you can get a sense of which templates are working well for other advertisers. Then you can customize the template with your logo, headlines, copy,  colors, even other images. The Ad Customizer tool will show you what your ad will look like in multiple display ad sizes.

Once you build your ad, you can run it on the Yahoo! network as a non-guaranteed display ad. (Advertisers who are managed by a Yahoo! account team can also run their ads on other sites through the Right Media Exchange.) You can also select the demographic, geographic  and content segments you want to target. (Keep in mind, though, that the more you target, the less potential traffic you may receive. We recommend starting broad and working your way smaller.) Our managed model also allows for additional targeting features such as behavioral targeting and ad scheduling.

Not sure if this is for you? The best way to figure that out is to go to our demonstration site and check Yahoo! My Display Ads out for yourself. You can play with the ads and customize them any way you want before you sign up. If you want more information or are ready to get started, visit the Yahoo! My Display Ads home page or contact your account manager.

Time to get creative!

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

On the Right Foot

3 choices you make when you start can affect you later

World-class sprinters spend hundreds of hours learning and perfecting their starts. They know that if they mis-time the crack of the starter’s gun, or stumble—even slightly—coming out of the blocks, the race is already lost.

Many of our blog readers are marketers who themselves are settling into a starting position and getting ready to run—except, it’s not a 100-meter dash, but a longer race to increase traffic to their sites using Sponsored Search. And choices you make when you’re starting can affect you a lot farther down the road. So below we’ve put together a list of the three most important things to look out for when opening a new account. Those of you already speeding down the track should keep reading, because it’s not too late to go back and make adjustments.

1. Keyword selection
If there’s one thing that makes a big impact on whether people will find you, it’s the keyword choices you make. It’s here that you need to think long and hard about your products and your unique place in the market. What is your product? What are the features and benefits? What would the average person type in a search box to find your product? What is your best seller? And what’s your competitive advantage?

You might be tempted to add every form of misspelling on your keywords…after all, people will make typos, right? However, with our system, this isn’t necessary. We’ll take the singular, non-punctuated, non-hyphenated, correctly spelled keyword without additional “noise” words (such as “a,” “the,” “of” and “for”) and automatically match it to common misspellings, singular/plural combinations and other variations.

While you can add up to 50 keywords at account opening, you may want to limit your list to about ten very specific ones. Your goal should be to create a clear and targeted marketing effort that will pull in the customers who are looking for exactly what you have to offer, and to get a good return on your advertising investment. Learn more about selecting keywords here.

2. Getting creative
Much like a 100-meter race, your ad will have about ten seconds to succeed or fail, because that’s how long the typical user takes to read it and consider clicking on it. As you write the ad copy, be sure to use the associated keywords in your title, because this will catch users’ eyes and can increase click-through rates.

You’ll also be asked to write a brief description for your ad. Not sure what to include here? You don’t have to be a professional copywriter to write a short ad (although you might consider hiring a professional if this truly isn’t your strength). Just think about the “four Ps” to help outline your unique place in the market:

• Products: What do you offer, and how will it solve a problem for your customer?
• Price: Is your price lower than competitors, and do you offer discounts or financing?
• Promotions: What kind of promotions do you offer, what’s on sale, and do you provide free shipping?
• Place: How and where can the customer get the product?

Learn more about writing ads here.

3. Two ads are better than one
Our online sign-up process helps you create one ad group containing just one ad. However, once you complete this process you’ll want to go into your account and create at least two ads per ad group. This enables our system to automatically rotate and test them against each other (A/B testing) to determine which has the higher click-through rate and should be displayed more often to users to get more traffic. You should also take this opportunity to double check that Ad Optimization is turned ON. Learn more about ad testing here.

Need more coaching?
If your Sponsored Search budget is $1,000 or more per month, you qualify to receive Assisted Setup for free both during your sign-up process and afterward. Yahoo!’s knowledgeable staff will study your website and put together a customized proposal, including recommended keywords and bid amounts based on your budget. We’ll also write professional ads for you, and enable tracking codes, so you can see the sources of your traffic.

Our online Help section is also available 24/7 to provide further info, and live and archived webinars are available to walk you through account best practices.

— Kastle Waserman, Communications Manager, Advertiser Solutions

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Matthew Storz

Diving Deeper into Targeting

We answer the more advanced Q-and-A’s from our recent webinar

Recently we shared five common questions we received at our March webinar on the slick new targeting features available to advertisers in their Sponsored Search accounts.

Some of our attendees, however, lobbed some more detailed questions at the team, and we thought these equally worth of sharing with our blog readers. As Sir Francis Bacon (mmmm, bacon) famously said, “Knowledge is Power,” so beef up your targeting expertise with the collected knowledge below:

Q.: Can geo-targeting and demographic bidding be configured through import (using a Yahoo! template, not an import of an AdWords campaign)?

A.: The import feature has not been updated to include these new enhancements at this time. However, we are continually looking to update our products and services. We will forward this suggestion to our Product Development team for future consideration.

Q.: Can you elaborate more on targeting by zip codes, city and DMAs? Can you run the same keywords in these campaigns simultaneously, and how does that affect the display of these keywords in the Yahoo! search engine?

A.: Your positioning or quality score will not be affected if you use the same keywords targeted to different areas. Duplicates will only hurt you if you are targeting the same areas with the same keywords, since you are then essentially competing with yourself.

Q.: Let’s say I had a ad group bid of $0.20, a keyword bid of $0.10, and ad scheduling bidding set to a 20% premium. Would my actual CPC be 20% over the ad groups bid or 20% over the keyword bid?

A.: In this scenario, your cost-per-click would be 20% above the keyword bid, not the ad group bid, because a keyword bid overrides an ad group bid.

Q.: Do you recommend reducing your standard bid across the board when you add a premium to specific times of day?

A.: That’s a decision each advertiser must make; however, either way you’ll want to make sure that you continue to at least meet the minimum required bid for a keyword before adding a premium to it for specific dayparts. If you do not meet the base minimum bid for a keyword, ads for that keyword will not be displayed, even if you add a premium.

Q.: If a user has an unknown IP address, will they see my geo-targeted ads, or will they be blocked from seeing them?

A.: Users with unknown IP addresses will not see ads from advertisers using geo-targeting on the keyword relevant to the user’s search term, unless we know their location based on user data. However, users could still see ads from ad groups or campaigns not using geo-targeting.

If you want to see and hear the entire targeting webinar, visit our Webinar Archive and click on the link for “Enhanced Targeting Capabilities.”

— The Team

Shopping in a Recession

Tough times mean a savvier consumer—and opportunities for you

Remember when you bought your first new car? Before you signed that contract, you probably did some serious research to help you decide where your dollar would be spent best. Well, research is showing that consumers in today’s recession aren’t just reserving their scrutiny for big-ticket items, they’re looking closely at just about everything they purchase—especially if they purchase it online.

In a new report, “E-Commerce in a Recession: The Impact on Consumers and Retailers,” eMarketer says that online research has become more important in e-commerce. “These consumers honed their Internet research skills during the 2008 holiday shopping season when, in search of savings and memorable gifts, they deftly moved between sites and tried different online shopping tactics,” the report says. It quotes a comScore study that shows that two-thirds of respondents used Internet research to shape their buying decisions during the last holiday season, and that 50% felt research was more important than it was the year before.

Interestingly, just as online research has gone up, US retail e-commerce sales have slowed, albeit just slightly. After years of double digit growth rates, US ecommerce sales (excluding travel) grew by only 4.6% in 2008. So what does all this mean? Consumers are getting smarter about how they shop online. And as consumers grow more savvy about online shopping, e-tailers need to get savvy right along with them. In doing so, they can increase their appeal to shoppers who are becoming more and more aware of the best ways to save online.

So what can advertisers do to keep up with consumers? Here are a few steps you can take:

Lower your prices
The number one thing, of course, is offer the best possible savings. During our current economic woes, every penny counts and consumers are seeking to hang onto as many as possible.

Give them coupons
According to a January 2009 comScore survey, coupon sites have become a vital destination for consumers looking to save. comScore told Advertising Age magazine (subscription required) that coupon sites are now the second most visited site on the Internet (behind job sites). Consumers are hungry for bargains. So if you’re able to offer them some, you should probably do so.

Coupons were a powerful incentive for users even before our current economic crisis, but they become even more sought after as belts tighten. If you offer coupons, be sure to let your users know in your ads. And if you don’t, consider making them available.

Offer free shipping
In addition to coupons, consumers are also seeking to save by purchasing from retailers who offer free shipping. According to Forrester Research (as cited by Internet Retailer), 75% of people interviewed in 2008 said they were more likely to shop with an online retailer who offered free shipping. As we’ve often said here on the YSM Blog, free shipping really makes users stand up and take notice.

If you offer it, be sure to call it out. Be careful to mention any caveats you may have, such as a certain amount users must spend before qualifying for free shipping. While a qualifying dollar amount may not deter users, not finding out about it until the items are in their shopping cart may.

Help them with their research
Other methods of reaching consumers include things like offering shipping confirmation, product reviews, multiple images of your products, live help or 24/7 customer service. Any extra help or guidance you can provide your customers could go a long way towards turning them from spectators into shoppers.

Though we’re in the midst of a recession, online e-tailers have a unique opportunity to reach customers who may be spending a little less, but who are more eager than ever to spend smart. They’re looking for the deals you have, so now more than ever, make sure they can find them.

—Noah Belson, Content Quality Analyst

Rejecting Rejections

5 rules to help your ads pass scrutiny

In terms of universal dating turn-offs, talking about an ex on the first date probably ranks in the top three. This is followed closely by chewing with your mouth open, obsessively texting your friends, and hints about your monthly income. The good news is that abiding by the simple “rules” of the dating game can be relatively pain-free.

We’ve collected our own list of do’s and don’ts, specifically related to editorial submissions (which each consist of keyword + ad copy + landing page). Brush up on your search marketing savvy and you reduce your chances of rejection:

1. Tell the truth
It’s shockingly simple, yet misrepresenting yourself is the number one editorial reject reason. In fact, we see it every day. For example, lists of trademarked terms are submitted without any seeming correlation to the accompanying websites.

To avoid this unappealing rejection, make sure that your brand keywords either a) represent a product you actually sell or b) represent non-competitive information on your landing page—stuff like news about the brand in question, unbiased reviews, or commentary.

2. Be prepared for popularity
This one’s a bit trickier. Every time you submit a new landing page URL, our crawler has to verify that it’s not a broken page. Obviously, potential customers aren’t pleased to get a “page not found” error after clicking your ad. The crawler also quickly scans the landing page to make sure there are no egregious editorial violations.

Here’s the potential problem: If you’re submitting a lot of new URLs, or you’re a first-time advertiser, our crawler will hit your site quite a bit. And if your site can’t handle the volume, the crawler will think it’s broken, and your submission(s) will be either rejected or routed to our editorial team for human review. Best way to avoid this: Anticipate these hits in advance, and be prepared.

3. Set expectations up front
You can increase the likelihood of search users getting to your website by letting them know exactly what you offer. Make sure your creative is as specific as possible, and clearly relevant to the search term. This way, your customers will know what to expect when they click on your ad. Also, insert the actual keyword within your ad copy—there’s no such thing as overkill when it comes to clarity.

4. Don’t be coy
Really, who wants to play games? There’s nothing more frustrating than reaching a website and not immediately finding what you’re looking for. To cure this Sponsored Search ailment, simply tailor your landing page to the content you advertise. This will help your customers fulfill their online experience, as you will clearly offer what they seek.

5. Follow through
It’s one of the basics in the dating world: If you say you’re going to call, then pick up that phone. If you weren’t planning on doing it in the first place, then why mislead your date…or in this case, potential consumer? Here’s the bottom line: Deliver on your promises. Pick keywords that are relevant to your offering, and double check that your website has relevant content related to each one.

The dating world may be treacherous, but creating solid Sponsored Search campaigns need not be. Follow these “big five” suggestions above, and you could be sealing a lot of new customer relationships more than a kiss.

— Malin Kennedy, Senior Manager, Advertiser Experience