Dear Abby for Web Advertising

The top 7 how-to’s of 2009

Well, it’s not quite like “Dear Abby,” but last year’s how-to posts from the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog and the Yahoo! Advertising blog are the next best thing. In the last year of the “aughts,” we tried to help show you the way to more effective Sponsored Search, and more effective Web advertising in general, with a bevy of posts that answered your most pressing questions—everything from how to develop strong keywords to how to keep those keywords and descriptions from facing rejection, to how to use social networks like Twitter and Facebook to get your messages out.

Here’s just a sample of what we shared (for more, visit the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog archive):

1. Build your foundation with strong keywords
When it comes to keywords, one way to get more conversions is to get really nitty-gritty. Consider bidding on more specific keywords that contain things like the brands you sell and even specific model numbers. In other words, think like your customers.

2. Tidy up to improve account performance
You know how it is with your garage, your desk at work, your computer’s desktop and files—just about everything gets cluttered, and thus, difficult to manage. Here are five ways to increase your performance by tidying up your account structure, keywords, ad quality and so forth. What was true in 2009 is just as true today.

3. Improve your quality score
We know you probably weren’t an English major, but even if you were, writing search marketing ads probably wasn’t taught in that Victorian Lit class you so enjoyed and got an A+ in. It’s a tricky business, writing high quality search ads, what with a slew of products and services and just 40 characters with which to promote your business. Here are four ways to improve your ads for lower cost and higher placement.

4. Rejecting rejections
Ouch! Rejection hurts. But we in Internet advertising have our standards. At least with us, it’s not personal. In fact, there are at least five pretty simple ways you can can use to help your ads avoid rejection by our editors. Forewarned is forearmed, and a little knowledge up front will help get your ads through the gauntlet. If only Internet dating was this easy!

5. Start out on the right foot
Listen, no one is a search advertising expert, at least not right off the bat. But you want to start out on the right foot. Smart starters focus on three major areas: keyword selection, good copywriting (which includes your title keywords) and testing two or more ads against one another. Give it a shot.

6. Bidding with your brain
When bidding on keywords, it all comes down to arithmetic, to wit: profit, CPA, ROAS and ROI. Good ad writing isn’t all fun, games, and cute wordplay—it’s an admixture (sorry for the pun) of both. To paraphrase Chuckles the Clown it’s, “a little song, a little dance and little arithmetic down your pants.” Oh, you want the algebraic details? Look here.

7. Marketing with social networks
This one’s a freebie. Yahoo’s got relationships with social networks like Facebook and Twitter—hey, they’re on our new homepage—but we don’t own ’em. So if you want to promote your business through ’em, we’re all for it. In this post, author and entrepreneur Clara Shih offers three solid tips on how to do just that.

—Michael Mattis

(Image by awezmaz, CC, 2.0)