Archive for February, 2010

Talk About A-Plus

Yahoo! at San Francisco’s 4A conference

Did you ever see the 1950 classic “All About Eve?” In it, Bette Davis plies the classic line, “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!”

Well Sunday, Feb. 28 begins the 4A Conference at the Union Square Hilton in San Francisco. At this fab confab, advertising’s best will appear and show off their newest and most fabulous wares. It promises to be a bumpy but fantastic conference, one full of surprises.

As the 4A the website says, it’s a chance for advertisers and agencies to “Collaborate with and ask questions of one another. Listen to leaders who have first-hand experience in transforming their own businesses to meet the emerging needs of a new era. Be a part of the bigger picture, the solutions to the time-consuming age-old questions of monetization and evolution.” That sounds pretty good. We can’t wait.

Here’s the up-shot on the Yahoo! down-low:

Sunday, Feb. 28

• 6:00 to 7 P.M: Opening Night Reception Sponsored by Yahoo! — Cityscape Room, Hilton

Monday, March 1

• 10 A.M: Carol Bartz, Transforming Yahoo! — Continental Ballroom, 2nd Floor
  Noon to 7 P.M: Yahoo! Transformation Lounge — Free custom lattes and live storyboard artist, lobby level
• 5:30 to 7 P.M: Cocktails in 4A’s Transformation Lounge (which includes a special Yahoo! space)
  7 P.M to 10 P.M: Dinner in Continental Ballroom sponsored by Microsoft

Tuesday, March 2

• 8 A.M. to 6 P.M Yahoo! Transformation Lounge Open — Free Custom lattes and live storyboard artist

Can’t be there? No problem. We will be, live blogging the events, tweeting and posting to the Yahoo! Advertising Facebook page.

—The Team

Yahoos at SMX West

Attending the SMX confab in Santa Clara next week? Check out our line-up of speakers and panelists

It’s no secret that we Yahoos are big fans of Danny Sullivan—the smooth jazz of SEO—and his Search Marketing Expo conference series. Next week, March 2 to 4, SMX West convenes at the Santa Clara Convention Center in (where else?) Santa Clara, Calif. Come check out what Danny has to say, and all the tips and trick that can help you be a better search marketer.

Of course, Yahoo! will be present at booth 216. We’ll also be giving away coffee in Yahoo!-branded mugs, as well as other fun tchotchkes, at our own coffee cart. We’ve also got a fabulous line-up of Yahoo! speakers to answer your questions about such hot-button topics as the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010
9:45 A.M. o 10:45 A.M.
Location: A1
Real Time Search & The Major Search Engines
Yahoo! Speaker:
Ivan Davtchev, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

Wednesday, March 3, 2010
1:30 to 2:45pm
Location: TBD
Search Meets Display, Display Meets Search
Yahoo Speaker:
David Oliveira, Regional Vice President Sales, Yahoo!

4:45 P.M. to 6:00 P.M.
Location: TBD
Ask the Paid Search Reps
Yahoo! Speaker:
Tomaso Pozzi, Product Manager, Yahoo!

Thursday, March 4, 2010
9:00 A.M to 9:45 A.M.
Location: A1
Keynote – The State of the Search Union
Yahoo! Speaker:
David Roth, Director of Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo! Inc.

10:00 A.M. to 11:15 A.M.
Location: A3
Bringing SEO In House: How To Be Successful!
Yahoo! Speaker:
Laura Lippay, Director of Technical Marketing, Yahoo!

11:30 A.M. to 12:30 A.M.
Location: A1
Ask The Search Engines
Yahoo! Speaker:
Arnab Bhattacharjee, Senior Director, Yahoo! Search Technology and Engineering, Yahoo!

Hope to see you all there!

—The Team

Optimize Your Way to a Cleaner Account

Keeping your list of blocked domains up-to-date

Some things are just plain messy. And unlike the savvy behind keeping previous W-2s neatly filed and probably the sanity behind saving—even electronically—old credit card statements for at least some time, there’s less to be said for clutter.

Desks strewn with random bits of paper and neon-colored post-it notes taped to every empty surface evidently work wonders for some. For others, it’s an impediment to productivity. Which might be why Spring cleaning has become an actual event for many.

Here at Yahoo!, we’re offering our own version of staying organized. Specifically as it relates to the list of blocked domains you’ve accrued within your account. As you know, we recommend using conversion data paired with the information within the recently launched Ad Delivery Report (ADR) to make sound decisions around which domains to block. And to help make sure that your list is as fresh, crisp and clean as possible, we’re happy to optimize those domains for you on a bi-monthly basis.

Optimize?

Yes, that’s our fancy little way of describing what one of our talented teams will do for you, at your request. That is, we’ll go through your list of blocked domains and highlight any that are no longer a part of our publisher network. Once you remove these, it will free up space, allowing you even more room to block those referring domains which don’t meet your conversion criteria.

Within a short time-frame, your account’s blocked domains list will be squeaky clean.
Which could possibly be as refreshing as purging old, indecipherable conference call notes, or getting rid of those crumpled Starbucks receipts that somehow accumulate at the bottom of your wallet.

Think of it as spring cleaning but offered year-round. To get started with a clean sweep, contact your Yahoo! account manager.

—Malin Kennedy, Senior Manager, Advertiser Experience

Yahoolympics scores 17.5 million fans

Yahoo! attracts largest online Olympic audience, Feb. 8 to 14

Whether it’s figure skating, freestyle skiing , snowboarding, hockey, or this year’s big game, curling, Winter Olympics fans are turning online in record numbers. And Yahoo!—the single most visited site for the Winter Olympics—is winning the gold in terms of unique visitors.

Yahoo’s Olympics site attracted 9.3 million unique visitors from February 8 to 14, according to comScore. That’s the largest online Olympics audience for the period, which included the Opening Ceremony and the first three days of competition, while Yahoo! Sports attracted more than 17.5 million unique visitors. Yahoo’s Olympics site surpassed both NBC’s Olympics site (6.5 million unique visitors) and ESPN (8.4 million unique visitors) during the same period.

For more, visit the Yahoo! Advertising blog.

(Curling image by bensonkua via Flickr, CC 2.0)

Ad News and Views from Around the Web

Yaho0! and Twitter team up; advertising is good; ad groups 101; Yahoo’s head of search on the Microsoft alliance, and more

Yahoo! gets all Twitterpated
Last night we announced a new partnership with Twitter that integrates Twitter’s real-time social experiences with Yahoo’s global network of more than 600 million users. Together with the recently announced Facebook integration, this relationship is a key part of advancing our social strategy, transforming Yahoo! into a highly customizable social experience that lets people unify their activity from their many social experiences across the Web. Good for users. Great for advertisers. For more details, head on over to Yodel Anecdotal.

Affiliates beware: Cali sales tax looming
Many search and display advertiser run affiliate networks, whereby they become the middle-men between consumers and suppliers. It’s a good business and one that provides an essential service. But the State of California is considering imposing a sales tax on affiliate sites that have suppliers in the state. While aimed at the big boys like Amazon.com and Overstock.com, the law could affect any affiliate site with relationships in the Golden State. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Carolyn Said explains.

Online ads help shoppers save
Advertising is often taken to the pillory for being self-serving. That’s just not fair. Good advertising serves an essential need in society. Without it, how would you know that there’s a better—or cheaper—mousetrap out there? eMarketer explains how online advertising is helping consumers save cash in tough times.

Once more, with feeling
In an intriguing piece in the libertarian journal Reason, Greg Beato cites the film “Art & Copy” and the cable TV hit “Mad Men,” to show that, contrary to popular opinion, advertising—like documentary film—can be a medium for truth-telling. Advertising, says Beato, works best when consumers feel that you are telling the truth about your product or service. We agree, truth be told.

ClickEquation’s ad groups 101
We’ve chatted about ad groups before. But don’t take it entirely from us. ClickEquation’s Craig Danuloff explores how ad groups work and how they can benefit your PPC campaigns. Couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

AdAge’s digital marketing guide to social Media
AdAge’s David Berkowitz offers up 16 answers to questions that people are asking now about marketing via social media—16 really good answers.

Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance coverage
By now you’ve no doubt heard about the Yahoo! and Microsoft search alliance. It’s kind of a big deal. So big, in fact, that this blog saw a 100-percent increase in traffic, there were 246 pieces of original news coverage, 283 broadcast clips and some 5,000 tweets—all in the first two days after the announcement. Here’s a synopsis of some of the most interesting news and analysis.

• Fox News
• The Beeb (BBC)
• MarketWatch
• Search Engine Land
• Marketing Pilgrim
• Search Engine Journal
• The London Telegraph on EU approval
• And, just for fun: The New York Times Yahoo! history timeline

A chat with Shashi Seth, our new SVP of Yahoo! Search Products
It’s been a busy month since Shashi Seth joined Yahoo! as our new Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search Products. In this video, Seth talks about his first month at Yahoo! and clarifies what he sees as some of the most important aspects of the agreement with Microsoft. View the video below, or visit the Yahoo! Search blog for more detail.

— Michael Mattis

Buying Time

Case Study: Digital media agency Sitewire wields the Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop Tool to cut its campaign management workload by a factor of ten

In the decade or so since its invention, untold numbers of businesses large and small have taken advantage of pay-per click advertising to generate more website visits and sales. Unfortunately, these companies sometimes found themselves to be victims of their own success: Having experienced good results with paid search marketing, they broadened their keyword lists and campaigns, only to find them increasingly difficult and time-consuming to effectively manage.

Sitewire, a digital media agency based in Tempe, Arizona, found itself as part of the group of companies carrying this “mixed bag.” It initially managed the Yahoo! Sponsored Search campaigns of its many clients, including the Darden Restaurant Group (Olive Garden, Red Lobster, etc.), via the import campaign feature available to all advertisers. While the performance of the campaigns was generally good, as more keywords, ad copy versions, landing page URLs and targeting parameters were added, using the Sponsored Search interface became increasingly time-consuming and prone to errors.

The right tool for the job
The Sitewire team expressed their concerns to their Yahoo! account manager, who suggested that they become one of the first Sponsored Search clients to try the beta version of the Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop, an application that allows users to easily and cost effectively create and manage Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns in bulk. The results were instantaneous and dramatic. “Without the tool, uploading account changes or new campaigns might take an hour,” says Andrew Freeman, a Media Planner at Sitewire. “Using the desktop tool, the same amount of work is done in only five minutes. It’s a huge time-saver to just push a button and have the campaign changes uploaded, versus the three steps that were required with the bulk upload sheet. We then have more time to do other tasks that help make our campaigns succeed, like performance analysis, keyword research and A/B testing.”

Quality control
One of the biggest contributors to the time savings is the tool’s accuracy and ability to instantly spot errors. “When you’re uploading in the traditional interface, you end up with a lot of errors, because the converter [for campaigns from other providers] doesn’t always work properly,” says Tammy Trujillo, Senior Media Planner at Sitewire. “Since we don’t have these mistakes in the desktop tool, it enables us to save a lot of time.”

Sitewire’s team uses the tool’s search feature to check their work and make sure no incorrect settings are missed. “The Desktop Tool is a much easier format than the bulk sheet to see if campaigns, landing page URLs and other things are set right,” says Trujillo. “There are also lots of things you can do with the tool that you can’t do in the bulk sheet, like pausing keywords or ads.” Also helpful to Sitewire was the Desktop Tool’s Getting Started Guide, which enabled the team to hit the ground running. “The guide also saved us time, in that we didn’t have to spend more of it doing a lot of trialand- error,” says Trujillo. “That—and our Yahoo! account manager Michelle Campbell—helped us work through the intricacies of the tool.”

Time Enough at Last
In this modern world where people never seem to find the time to accomplish everything on their todo lists, the Search Marketing Desktop Tool proves its worth over and over again. “The tool is a great solution for us,” says Freeman. “We can import a third-party campaign in two or three minutes, versus the 30 minutes it used to take. We’re more efficient with our time, and as a result, our clients’ campaigns are more efficient.”

About Sitewire: Sitewire is a digital media agency, focusing on local, mobile, social, and search communication strategies. The company’s notable clients include the Darden Restaurant Group (which includes Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Longhorn Steakhouse, The Capital Grille, and Bahama Breeze), and Sage.

To learn more about how the Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop Tool can augment your search marketing efforts, and install it now, visit the Desktop Tool home page.

For more on recent upgrades and enhancements, check out our January blog post and video.

— The Team

What Do I Do With All This Data?

Yahoo’s Scott Burke answers your questions

It’s a pretty common question among online advertisers: How do I use all the marketing metrics I’m inundated with? In an article posted yesterday on Ad Age, Scott Burke, our VP of engineering, user data and analytics, tackles that question with some pretty detailed answers, and talks about what’s important now—whether it’s clicks, time spent, the delta between search and display analytics, and much more. Click over to Ad Age for all the details.

—The Team

(Image by Pink Sherbet Photography via Flickr CC 2.0)

Is Your Site Invisible?

Easy ways to determine if search engines can find your site

If search engines can’t find your site, it may as well be the Invisible Man. Search engines like Yahoo!, Google, Bing and others are often a primary source of traffic and determine your ranking. Unfortunately, publishing your files to the Internet does not guarantee that the search engines are going to find them. 

Search engines crawl the Web, indexing pages and following links to find more pages. That’s their job. Pages that are newly published can appear in a search engine’s index (and in search results) within minutes, but sometimes it takes hours or even days.

This article will help you to get an idea of whether the search engines are finding your site, and what they see. In the examples below we’ll look at Yahoo!, Google and Bing, the three search engines with the highest market share in the U.S.

How to tell if your pages are being found by search engines
To determine if your site is indeed being indexed, do this simple search in the search box on any of the search engines by putting “site:” before your URL. Specific instructions like this are called “operators.” By typing that before the URL, you’re using what’s known as the “site operator.”

Example: site:yoursite.com

Don’t leave any spaces in the query. It should look like this:

The results will bring back pages from that site only. If you do not see any results from a site:yoursite.com search, then the search engine is not finding your site. 

Google does not show duplicate pages in these results, but it does allow you to see what’s been filtered. In order to see all pages, including ones Google deems as duplicates, look for a link after your very last search result listing that says, repeat the search with the omitted results included.  Click on that link to see all pages that Google considers duplicates of the ones listed in the initial query results. 

Or simply add &filter=0 to the end of the URL in your browser address bar and hit enter.

If you don’t see the “repeat the search with the omitted results included” link or do not see any changes when you add &filter=0 to your URL string, then you don’t have any previously filtered duplicate pages. This is a good thing because duplicate pages can split your in-link value among many landing pages instead of one, potentially hurting the rankings of your canonical landing page.

Is your content being crawled by search engines?
Search engines may find your page URLs when they crawl the Web following links, but they may not have the content of your pages indexed. To determine what search engines are actually indexing, you can click on the “cache” link on listings in search results.

If you’re looking for any page on your site–You can use the same site: operator referenced above.

If you’re looking for a specific page on your site–You can do a search for the page by entering the exact URL in the search box.

If you’re looking for specific content on your site—Enter the site: operator followed by an exact phrase in quotes in the search box (no spaces).

To check what each search engine has cached, click on the cache link under the result you’re interested in.  Here are screenshots of the cache link on Yahoo! (Google and Bing look pretty much the same).

When you click on the cached page, you will see the content that the search engine has actually indexed. Compare that to the page you see in your browser when you visit the page itself.  Do you see any content missing?

Note the content may have changed since the last time the search engine crawled your page. Search engines also sometimes choose not to index “noise” on a page such as advertisements. What is important to look for here is that the topical content of the page at the time the crawler visited was indeed indexed. If there is important content missing, there could be various reasons why.

Read the Search Engine Guidelines referenced below for more information, and stay tuned for the next SEO article where we’ll discuss steps you can take to make sure you’re doing everything you can to help the search engines index and crawl your content. 

Search engine guidelines for webmasters

• Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines
• Bing guidelines for successful indexing
• Google Webmaster Guidelines

—Laura Lippay, Director of Technical Marketing

(Image courtesy ‘J’, via Flickr, CC 2.0)

Catch the Revenue Wave

Ecosystem 2.0 conference explores profiting from interactivity

All the big names in online advertising are surfing to Southern California for Ecosystem 2.0, which this year is focused on the theme of “Revenue: The Next Wave.” The annual conference brings together the smartest and most influential of online advertising’s kahunas, so naturally Yahoo! will be there hanging ten when it kicks off on Sunday, Feb. 21.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the event’s main sponsor, says the focus will be on figuring out how to deliver on the profit potential promised by interactivity.

Award-winning event
We’re particularly proud that Yahoo! is receiving the award for “Most Innovative” interactive media sales organization. Seth Dallaire, Yahoo! Vice President of Mid-Market Sales, will accept the honor on behalf of everyone at Yahoo! whose hard work combined inventive ideas about content, advertising solutions and data usage to create new, long-lasting revenue streams for its advertiser and publishing partners.

Another highlight of Ecosystem 2.0 is “The Great Debate” on Feb. 23. This annual spotlight brings together the guiding lights of online advertising to share their expert opinion on every aspect of a hot topic, which this year is: “RESOLVED: I Own the Data.”

The debate’s four speakers include Yahoo! Vice President of U.S. Partnerships, Ramsey McGrory. He’s really involved in how Yahoo! gathers, handles, utilizes, analyzes and protects incredible amounts of digital data, so he’s the perfect person to explain how we’re delivering value for Yahoo! advertising and publisher partners while retaining respect for privacy and addressing other concerns.

Yahoo! is adding some special touches to lunch on Feb. 22, too—as if three days at the La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad isn’t special enough! Just don’t forget the sunblock and surf wax.

What: IAB’s Ecosystem 2.0
When: Feb. 21 to 23, 2010
Where: La Costa Resort and Spa, Carlsbad, Calif.
Why: Because you look a little pale and could use some sunshine

—Chris Marlowe

(Surfer image courtesy mikebaird via Flickr, CC 2.0)

New Alliance Heralds New Opportunities

How the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance works for advertisers

Yahoo! and Microsoft have received U.S. and E.U. regulatory clearance for their search transaction. The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance will provide a competitive search platform that we believe will drive innovation in search and search advertising, offer a more engaging and personalized experience for consumers, and create greater value for advertisers and publishers. It will not immediately affect your account.

How this benefits you
Once implemented, the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance will allow advertisers to:

Reach more customers—The alliance will help you reach up to 150 million searchers and get approximately 62 percent more search volume* than on Yahoo! alone through a new, unified search marketplace combining the Yahoo! and Microsoft networks. We’ll continue to innovate and enhance the search experience on our leading Web properties, driving even more search volume.

Save valuable time and effort—Once implemented, you’ll be able log into one place—Microsoft’s adCenter—to manage all your campaigns, for greater efficiency and a better return on investment. You’ll also be able to reach users on both Yahoo! and Microsoft sites, as well as other premium partner sites.

Benefit from rapid innovation—Yahoo! is continually delivering new features and innovations  to the world’s favorite online destinations, content, and Web products used by hundreds of millions of consumers to connect to the people and things that matter to them most. That innovation will only accelerate under the new alliance. Microsoft will continue to develop the underlying technologies that drive high quality algorithmic and paid search results, while we will use our resources to improve the advertiser and consumer search experience.

We expect advertisers, publishers and consumers to benefit from this alliance. By establishing a more competitive paid search marketplace, publishers (our affiliate partners) will also benefit through potentially better monetization and stronger innovation, while end users will benefit by our increased focus on creating even more engaging and personalized experience for our users.

What should I do now?
Nothing. There will be no immediate changes to your account. Both companies are committed to making this transition as seamless and beneficial to you as possible. Our aim is a high quality transition of advertisers and partners in at least the U.S. prior to the 2010 holiday season. However, we may wait until 2011 if we determine this will be more effective.

Continue to stay tuned to this blog and your account alerts for news and information on the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance.

For more on the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, visit:

• The Yahoo! Transition Center.

—The Team

*Sources:  comScore custom data, December 2009 and comScore qSearch December, 2009, respectively

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