Set Your Campaign Performance to Optimize

Network distribution feature lets you control where your traffic comes from and how much you pay for it

Many Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers have long asked for more tools to help optimize campaign performance, which would give you greater ability to control of bidding and where your ads appear.

We heard your requests, and in January we released the network distribution feature, which allows you to decide whether you want your ads displayed only on Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! partner sites, or both. If you choose to target the Entire Network (i.e., both Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Partners), you have the ability to apply discounts or premiums to clicks from Yahoo! partner sites.

As with any tool, you need to use it correctly to get the greatest benefit. Below are a few things to consider when you use the network distribution feature, which can help you reach your marketing objectives.

Should I even use the network distribution feature?
Your Yahoo! campaign goals, the available time you have to optimize your Yahoo! Search campaigns, and the tools you currently use will help decide how (and if) you should use the network distribution feature to optimize performance.

The network distribution feature is not the right tool for all advertisers. If you use it, you should set aside some time each week to monitor your campaign performance and actively make adjustments to the network distribution settings to help ensure success.

Using the network distribution feature may not be right for you if:

• You’re busy running your business and have limited time to optimize your Yahoo! Search campaigns.
• You do not have the resources to track conversions from your Yahoo! Search campaigns.
• You’re new to advertising with Yahoo! Search Marketing.

If any of the above are true, you can comfortably leave the network distribution setting at the default, “Entire Network.” Yahoo!’s pricing algorithms are already designed to automatically assess the performance of the traffic you receive, and charge you for clicks on Yahoo! Partners sites according to the quality of that traffic.

However, if you’re a experienced search advertiser who actively manages your Yahoo! campaigns to hit a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) or return-on-investment (ROI) target, the network distribution feature offers a plethora of information and controls to improve performance. So go ahead and give it a try!

How to use the network distribution feature
As with any optimization strategy, you will need to test different tactics to find the ones that will help you best meet your marketing targets. The three steps are:

1) Measure current performance
When optimizing performance using the network distribution feature, you should first measure how your campaigns are currently performing versus your targets. You can use the new Network Distribution Performance Report or your internal reporting tools to accomplish this. The NDPR allows you to measure relative performance between Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Partners at any of three levels—campaign, ad group or keyword. Measure performance at the level at which you plan to make the adjustments to the network distribution settings.

2) Adjust settings
Armed with performance data, adjust your network distribution settings to narrow the gap between observed performance and your targets. There are two ways to do this:

Using bid adjustments: Keep targeting to Entire Network, and adjust bids on your Yahoo! Partner traffic at the campaign or ad group level, based on its performance relative to traffic from Yahoo! Search. This is a quick fix and helps keep your account small and manageable. On the downside, it does not provide the flexibility of unique destination URLs or separate budgeting for Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Partners.

Creating duplicate campaigns/ad groups: Duplicate your high-value campaigns and/or ad groups, with the originals targeting just Yahoo! Search and the duplicates targeting just Yahoo! Partners. Then adjust your keyword-level bids on both sets of campaigns/ad groups to reach your desired performance. This will give you more control and better optimization capabilities. You can also create custom messaging, use unique destination URLs, and manage budgets separately for each channel. The downside is that this can increase the size of your account and the complexity of account management.

3) Tune
You should continually test for success. Make bid changes in small steps, observe the results of these changes, and then make further adjustments as needed to achieve your target performance.

General best practices
Use our blocked domains feature to stop your account from receiving traffic from domains that don’t provide good results. You can use the insight from the Ad Delivery Report to help you select which domains to block.

Tracking conversions is essential to measure performance, so use our free Conversion-only Analytics tool if you are not currently recording conversion data. The tool allows you to track conversion events by domain, and record revenue that might be associated with any transaction.

For more information on the network distribution feature, we invite you to view our archived webinar.

— Ashok Kanjamala, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Yahoo! Search