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