Posts filed under 'Account Upgrade Info'

From the Ground Up

Building Your Yahoo! Search Marketing Account

It’s a mystery why the Great Pyramid of Giza is the only structure of the original Seven Wonders of the World that still stands today. Scholars assume that it’s due to its sturdy architecture, but no one knows for sure the actual construction methods that were used to build it.

You may not know much about building your search marketing account, either. But unlike the pyramids, the methods for structuring your search marketing account don’t have to remain a mystery.

Your account is made up of up to 20 campaigns, your campaigns are made up of ad groups, and your ad groups are made up of ads and keywords. What you do at each level matters. Let’s start at the base of your paid search pyramid and work our way up.

Keywords
You can put up to 1,000 keywords in a single ad group  – but you wouldn’t want to. The more keywords in an ad group, the less likely they are to be relevant to each other. It also makes writing ads a lot harder. For easier account management, we recommend:

• Using around 20 keywords in each ad group
• Using click-through rate to determine poor-performing keywords that can be moved into other ad groups.

Don’t put the same keywords in multiple ad groups within your campaigns.  This will cause those keywords to compete with each other, and only one can be displayed in a single set of search results. There are two exceptions:

• When creating a geo-targeted campaign and a non-geo-targeted campaign.
• Within seasonal campaigns targeted for specific holidays, such as Mother’s Day or Father’s Day.

Ad Groups
A well-organized ad group links similar keywords to relevant ads.  When structuring your ad groups, the following tips can help you get better results as you learn what’s working and what’s not:

• Organizing related keywords in your ad groups makes it easier to create more ads that will perform well for each keyword.
• When you’ve identified keywords that aren’t performing well, move these poor performers into their own ad group (making sure they stay as relevant to each other as possible) and price them accordingly. This helps to maintain the ad quality associated with your better-performing keywords.
• Write ads that fit the keywords in your ad group, and test them to see which ads work the best.

Campaigns
So, when do you need to set up a new campaign, as opposed to simply making another ad group? You should create separate campaigns for ads that:

• Target specific geographic areas
• Have goals with specific budgets
• Need to be scheduled with specific beginning and ending dates
• Use the Content Match tactic for ad distribution.

The pyramids weren’t built overnight, and your account structure won’t be either. But stone by stone, with constant attention, you can construct a solid ad organization that will stand the test of time.

–Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo! Search Marketing Writer

Photo credit By Nina Aldin Thune 

No-Cost Campaign Design

How to Move and Copy Ad Groups within Your Campaigns

I don’t know about you, but I am a huge fan of do-it-yourself home design shows. My favorites are those that demonstrate how moving a few pieces of furniture can change the whole look of a room without spending any money.

It’s hard to believe that an area rug from a dining room and a few pieces of wall art from a bedroom can transform a living room into the perfect gathering place, but these no-cost design shows produce dramatic transformations each and every time.

Similarly, you can make improvements in your account by doing your own “Spring cleaning:” moving ad groups from one campaign to another. You may want to move ad groups when your campaigns become too large for easy management, or when you want to add certain ad groups to a newly created campaign.

Moving an Ad Group to a Different Campaign
Transferring approved and pending keywords and ads to a new or different campaign is simple and quick if you follow these steps:

1. Click the Campaigns tab.
2. Click on the name of the campaign that contains the ad group that you want to move.
3. Click on the name of the ad group you want to move.
4. Click the down arrow to the right of the Ad Group Settings button.
5. Select “Move.”
6. You can make changes to these parameters:
• Assign to Campaign - Select an existing campaign to which to assign your ad group.
• Excluded Words - You can add excluded words to apply to your ad group.
  Click the “Save Changes” button. 

Copying an Ad Group to a Different Campaign
You also have the option to duplicate ad groups and assign them to other campaigns—without moving them from their original location—by following these steps:

1. Click the Campaigns tab.
2. Click on the name of the campaign that contains the ad group that you want to copy.
3. Click on the name of the ad group you want to copy.
4. Click the down arrow to the right of the Ad Group Settings button.
5. Select “Copy.”
6. You can make changes to these parameters:
• New Ad Group Name—Create a new name for the ad group you are creating. Ad group names must be unique within a campaign. If you copy an ad group to the same campaign, you must choose a new name for the ad group.
• Assign to Campaign—Select an existing campaign to which to assign your ad group.
• Ad Group Status—You can turn the status of your ad group on or off.
• Watch List—You can add or remove the ad group from your Watch List.
• Distribution Tactic—You can change Sponsored Search and Content Match distribution tactics for your ad group.
• Match Type—You can select the Standard or Advanced match type for your ad group.
• Excluded Words—You can add excluded words to apply to your ad group.
• Optimize Ad Display—Select “Yes” to ensure that the ads that have higher click-through rates are displayed more frequently, or select “No” to equally display each ad in the ad group.

7. Click the “Save Changes” button.

Remember that ad groups can be moved whether their status is “on” or “off.” When you move ad groups, their status does not change, nor does the status of the ad group’s keywords and ads.

If your mop and dust-rag are at the ready, it’s time to start your Spring cleaning!

—Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo! Search Marketing Writer

Quality is His New Job, For One

New VP to help ensure that all of our constituents benefit from a focus on marketplace quality

As an advertiser, you know quality traffic when you see it. You want highly qualified clicks from trusted sources by users most likely to become customers. That simple statement is our ongoing challenge.

The sites where your ads are displayed, our publishers, want quality, too, in the form of ads that fit their content and appeal to their users. And those users know a little about quality, as well. They want relevant content, products and services that meet their needs, wrapped into an engaging, trusted experience—all of which are vital to overall quality.

In fact, Yahoo!’s click-through protection system proactively identifies and does not bill advertisers for between 12 and 15 percent of clicks on average. This includes not only click fraud, but also other types of clicks that Yahoo! believes should not be billed to advertisers 

We’re Panamaniacs
Unless you’ve been advertising from under a rock for the last several months, you must know that we recently rolled out a new search advertising system, sometimes called “Project Panama.” This new system gives you, the advertiser, considerably more visibility into your ads’ quality, as well as more control over your campaigns.

But “Project Panama” is far from “stick-a-fork-in-it” done. New features and organizational enhancements will roll out over the coming weeks and months, providing you with even more control and visibility into your ads’ quality.

One of the new features is quality-based pricing (which will help ensure that traffic is priced consistently with the quality it delivers) and domain blocking. Also, we’re developing an advertiser marketplace quality council made up of selected advertisers who will travel to our search marketing HQ and advise our quality teams on their approach. Finally, we’re enhancing our customer care and claims review teams to help them be more efficient and responsive to your needs and concerns.

A Man, a Plan…
To help us implement these new features and enhancements, today we’re pleased to announce the appointment of a new vice president of Marketplace Quality. The new VP, Reggie Davis, will be 100 percent dedicated to ensuring quality across for Yahoo!’s Advertiser, publishers and end users. Reggie will drive all of our quality efforts, hiring a dedicated staff that will coordinate quality teams across the organization.

Welcome aboard, Reggie.

—Michael Mattis

Log-in Tip

Finding a Way In

Recently, the helping hands in our Customer Solutions department have fielded a number of calls from people who were having a hard time finding their log-in page.

You can go right to the Marketing Solutions sign-in page at:

http://marketingsolutions.yahoo.com
 
It’s best to bookmark this page, so that you can go directly there anytime.

In addition, we also maintain a link to the log-in page here on the blog, in the right-hand column under “Useful Links.”

—The Team
 

Standard or Advanced Match?

That is the question

To be or not to be? Does time have a beginning? What is the meaning of life?

These are some of the great philosophical questions of the ages. A less heady, but perhaps more immediate question for Yahoo! search advertisers might be, “How does “Panama” affect the Standard and Advanced match types?”

Match Game ‘07
A match type, as you may recall, is an option in Sponsored Search that helps determine how search terms are matched to your ads. The Standard “match” type can display your ads for “exact” matches to your keywords, their singular and plural variations, and common misspellings.

The Advanced match type, on the other hand can display your ads for a broader range of searches relevant to your keywords, titles and descriptions, and web content. The Advanced match type is the default setting for all of your ads.

What’s changed
Before we launched the new ranking model in the U.S., ads were ordered like this:

1. All Standard match type ads
- Highest bid to lowest bid

Followed by…

2. All Advanced match type ads
- Highest bid to lowest bid

Now, with the the launch of the new ranking model in the U.S., ads of both match types will be displayed together—i.e., mixed—in sponsored search results.
In short, Standard match type ads no longer receive priority in sponsred search results. Instead, all Standard and Advanced match type ads that are relevant for a given search term are now ranked on their bid amount and ad quality. This may increase the competition on certain keywords for both types of ads, and could cause some advertisers to pay higher click charges and receive more traffic volume—or vice versa—than they received under old ranking model. (But you will never pay more that your maximum bid.)

To change from Advanced to Standard match, or vice versa, go to the “Campaigns” tab. From here you can toggle between Advanced and Standard match by selecting one or more campaigns using the check boxes in the far left column, clicking the “Select Tactic” button and selecting either Advanced or Standard match type.

Excluded Words
To help block unwanted matches when using the Advanced match type, use excluded words. Excluded words can help you refine the matches you receive through the Advanced match type by blocking certain searches that you believe will not be relevant.

For example, if you sell ocean cruises, you wouldn’t want to appear in results for “Tom Cruise,” would you? Or, if you sell engagement rings, your ad may appear in results for “diamond rings,” “platinum rings,” and so forth. That’s great if you sell them all. If you don’t, you should exclude “diamond rings” and “platinum rings.” You should also exclude “Lord of the Rings,” unless of course you sell Hobbit antiques.

Here are some more examples:

You can add excluded words to an ad group by clicking on the “Ad Group Settings,” selecting “Tactic Settings” and clicking the link in the pop-up next to Excluded Words.

—Michael Mattis

Improving Ad Quality, Part IV

Structure Matters

By now you’ve started to see how your campaigns work with the new ranking model, and hopefully you’re seeing some positive results. We’ve previously talked about ways to help improve your ads so that they perform better under the new ranking model–using the Insert Keyword feature and Ad Testing are two examples.

How you structure your account can impact your ads’ performance. For example, you may want different campaigns for your brand keywords and your product keywords because you may want to track budgets separately. Or you may want to set up campaigns for specific geographies using geo-targeting or holiday campaigns using the scheduling feature. (Note that most accounts are limited to 20 campaigns.)

In general, the structure of your ad groups can help improve the relevance? of your ads to the search terms for which they may be displayed. There are a number of ways to do this, but here are three things that you may want to consider:

Categorize
Ad groups should be thought of as groups of keywords that are related to each other. The closer you can group your keywords together, the more specific you can be with the ads that display with those keywords.  Obviously there is a tradeoff here between specificity and efficiency of management, but generally, the more specific you can get with your groupings of ads and their relevant keywords, the better performance you should achieve.

Isolate and Protect Value
Not all of your keywords should be considered equal. If you were to take all of your keywords, gather their performance over a month and rank them by whichever metric was most important to you (impressions, clicks, conversions, revenue, etc.) you should see definite patterns and differences.

In general, you may find that roughly 10 percent of your keywords account for 90 percent of the value you’re measuring. It’s a classic rule of thumb in the search world. This isn’t to say that the other 90 percent of keywords are useless, just that those 10 percent are probably super important. 

Protect this extraordinary value and isolate these keywords into their own ad groups. This way you can take total control of the messages you are communicating to these searchers. You can test ads specifically for these keywords, not muddy the waters in any way, and could see improvements in your ad quality.

Think of the Customer Experience
There’s a path that most customers take when making a purchase decision. First, they seek out the options available to them. Next, they weigh those options. And finally, they make a decision to make a specific purchase.

If you want to get really sophisticated with your account structure, you can start to take advantage of this “buying cycle.” Group your keywords (still by category) into ad groups that are associated with where customers are in their decision-making processes.  In general, keywords with more impressions are more geared toward “attention,” whereas more specific keywords are closer to the purchase action. Once you set this up, you can then alter the creative in your ads to focus on bringing them down the path for your particular product.

Remember, structure does matter. How you link your ads with your keywords may have a significant impact on their overall performance and ultimately, with our new system, the economics of your account. 

View previous posts in this series:

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III

—Michael Egan, Senior Director, Content Solutions

Save the Date

An intro to Panama’s handy new calendar tools

February is the shortest month of the year, but it’s still host to Groundhog Day, Valentine’s Day, the Daytona 500, the NBA All-Star game and the decadent celebration known as Mardi Gras. A little less known is the traditional February 6 New Zealand holiday, Waitangi Day, which commemorates a major historical event in that nation’s founding. And while your bank may have been closed on February 19 for this year’s President’s Day, celebrations across the globe commemorated the February 6 birthday of reggae music legend, Bob Marley.

A span of time doesn’t have to have a global agenda surrounding it to be of importance to you. That’s why we’ve provided tools in the new search marketing system to help get you the information you need for the dates that you want it.

Calendar icons appear on the account dashboard page, and in the performance sections at the campaign, ad group and keyword levels. Use the icons to set a date range to view your performance data at each level.

• Click on the left calendar icon to view two consecutive calendar months.
• Select a date from each month to view performance data over two months.
• Select two dates within the same month to view performance for a single month.
• Select one date to view performance data for one day.

Use the right calendar icon if you want to see performance data for a specified time, such as the last calendar quarter, week-to-date, or the last seven days.

• Click on the right calendar icon to easily select a pre-defined date range.
• Click “Apply” at the bottom of the pop-up window to set your date range and change your performance results view.
• Click on the “x” in the top-right corner of the pop-up window if you do not want to apply the date range.

Lastly, remember to check the date range displayed next to the calendar icons (especially when seeking billing information) to ensure your data is displayed for your desired dates. The date range defaults to the prior 14 days each time you sign in to your account; however, if you change the date range at any level, date ranges are changed for all levels, including reporting.

—Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo Search Marketing Writer

Improving Ad Quality, Part III

Using the Insert Keyword feature

In search advertising, relevance in everything. If I search on the term “42 Inch Plasma TV” and the first two results look like this, my eye and my click immediately go to the second ad.

Why? Because that’s what I was expecting to see. That’s what I wanted to see. That advertiser is explicitly telling me that they have the product I was asking for.

Fact is, simply placing your bidded keyword into your ad’s creative goes a long way toward making your ad more relevant to the potential customer, and thus improving your ad quality. (Hint: We’ve found that placing the keyword in the title is even better than placing it in the description.)

Insert Keyword Here
Luckily, we’ve made this much simpler in the new Sponsored Search system with a function we’ve called, creatively, Insert Keyword. Let me walk you through how it works so that you use it every chance you can: 

1.  On the Create New Ad page, place your cursor in either the Title or Description fields. A blue note will appear below the box: + Insert Keyword Automatically.

2. Click on the + Insert Keyword Automatically message and you’ll get a pop-up box that looks like this:

3. Enter the default text, click on “Add Keyword Placeholder” and voila! 

Wherever this notation—{KEYWORD: YourDefaultText}—appears in your ads, our system is designed to automatically identify which of your bidded keywords is being mapped to the search terms, and insert that keyword at that position.

(If you get confused at any time while using the Insert Keyword feature and feel like you’re alone on a desert island, hit the Help button, which will take you directly to the section that deals with Insert Keyword.)

Default text tips
What is the purpose of “default text?” Which form of the keyword do we display? Can that be altered?  Basically, default text appears if the system determines that a bidded keyword (or Alternative Text*) exceeds the system’s character limits. It is the text of last resort, which is why we require it.

So what should you put in the Enter Default Text box? Use a word or words that generally describe all of the keywords that you have in your ad group. Take our TVs example. That ad group may have a whole range of TV-related terms, including 42 inch Plasma TV, LCD TV, Wall Mount TV, etc. In this situation, you might choose TVs as your default text. Yes, it’s general, but it will work in a pinch if the system determines that your keyword won’t fit. 

Remember, having a direct relationship between what the potential customer is searching on and the creative of your ad can help you attract more customers and improve your ad quality.

*We’ll explore this handy feature in a future post.

—Michael Egan, Senior Director, Content Solutions

Read the first and second parts of this series. Read more about the Insert Keyword feature.

Improving Ad Quality, Part II

Finding the right message for your customers with Ad Testing

It’s hard to argue that Tiger Woods is pretty darn good at what he does. But even he is not perfect. Imagine if he were allowed to hit four balls each time and then choose the shot that worked the best. Scary good.

We’re giving you that opportunity with our new ad testing feature In concept, it’s like giving Tiger multiple shots from which to choose the best lie. Ad Testing is a “must do” if you are really trying to improve the quality of your ads.

Implementing ad testing is simple: For each ad group you submit multiple ads (you can submit up to 20), make sure Ad Optimization is on and then let the system do the work for you.

But to really take control of this and find long-term value, it is important to understand two things:

1. How it works—how does the system determine which ad is performing better and then what does it do, and
2. What you should test

How it Works
Ad testing works as soon as there is more than one creative in an ad group.  If you submit multiple ads within an ad group, you have two choices with respect to the frequency in which those ads are displayed. If you set Ad Optimization to “off,” the ads will be displayed in relatively equal distribution, depending on a number of factors.

Alternatively, if you set Ad Optimization to “on”, the system will begin by showing the ads in relatively equal distribution, but, as it learns which ad performs better from a click-through-rate (CTR) normalized by position perspective, it will begin to show that ad more frequently.

How quickly will the system react? Well, that depends on the number of searches that your keywords receive. In general, the more impressions you receive, the more robust the data should become, and the system may really start to make some decisions. 
It is important to note, however, that normalized CTR performance is based on how an ad performs across the entire set of keywords in that ad group. Ad testing will not actually pair up ads to keywords. Instead, the system looks to see which ad performs best across all keywords combined.

What to Test
Beyond making sure that your ads comply with our editorial guidelines, you’re pretty free to test what you want. To get the most long-term value out of this feature, let me offer some advice:

The 3 C’s: There is a common marketing framework called the 3 C’s: Customer, Competition and Company (you). Use this idea to think about what it is that differentiates you from your competitors and makes you more relevant to your customers. You may have an idea of what this is, but this is your opportunity to test different offers, different language and different sequences of words that best attract the right customers for you.

Focus: Don’t try to test everything at once. Concentrate on specific characteristics of your ads and test those characteristics. If you try to bite off too much at one time, it will be very difficult to really understand which aspects of your ads drove the success or failure. It’s probably best to limit yourself to two to five ads at any one point so that you can track what is happening easily and get results across your ads more rapidly.

Iterate: Don’t treat ad testing as a one-time effort. After all, the marketplaces in which you compete are dynamic. The special offers you provide your customers probably change, and your competitors are certainly trying new things all the time. Once you begin to understand which offer works best, start working on the language you’re using to communicate that offer. 

Isolate: There are likely a small handful of keywords that drive a majority of the value you achieve from your search marketing efforts. Isolate these for a time in their own ad groups so that you can test specifically on these important markets. This makes sure that your ads’ performance is really based on these keywords, rather than being influenced by the ads’ performance with other less-important keywords.

Ad testing can be key to helping you make your ads more relevant, which can improve your ads’ ranking and your success. While I can’t promise that you’ll be the next Tiger Woods, if you take advantage of this feature you will likely start to see improvements in your ads’ performance.

Read Part I of this series.

Visit Help for more »

—Michael Egan, Sr. Director, Content Solutions

Where’s My Stuff?

Navigating your upgraded account

Let’s say you come to work one day and everything on your desk is in a different place. Your first thoughts might be that your co-workers or the cleaning staff is playing a horrible trick on you. You ask around and find that an efficiency expert has come and put things in a logical order that allows you greater organization, a larger capacity for strategic business planning, and more overall ease-of-use.

But after an explanation of the intuitive greatness of your color-coded filing system and how the position of your monitor allows for maximum ergonomic comfort, you still just want to know, “Where’s my stuff?” (OK, you may not say those exact words, but this is a family blog).

We understand you may have some confusion surrounding your account upgrade, so here are a few tips that may assist you in answering your biggest concerns with regard to the new Sponsored Search system:

Where are my Keywords?
Your keywords have been grouped into “Ad Groups.” Ad groups make up “Campaigns,” which were previously known as “categories” in the “old” Sponsored Search. To view this new hierarchy from a top-down view, click on the “Campaigns” tab in your account. You will see a list of all of your campaigns in the bottom section of your account dashboard:

• Click on a campaign to view its ad groups at the bottom of the resulting screen.
• Click on an ad group to view all of its associated keywords.
• Click on a keyword to set your bid.

Since campaigns and ad groups were not a part of the legacy system, we had to take a few liberties when naming your account information. There is both rhyme and reason in the way we named your campaigns and ad groups:

• Campaign names in your upgraded account are the category names from your old account.
• Ad group names were assigned based on keywords.
• Keywords with the same titles, descriptions, and URLs were grouped into one ad group.
• Keywords with unique titles, descriptions, and URLs were grouped into separate ad groups.
• Ad group names were chosen based on noted similarities in your keywords.

Please note that you may find some ad groups that have been named “Ad Group 001,” “Ad Group 002,” etc. This is the naming convention that we used when an obvious similarity was not found.

If you would like to change the names of your campaigns, click the blue “Campaign Settings” button, then the “edit” button within the Campaign General Information section.

If you would like to change the names of your ad groups, click the blue “Ad Group Settings” button at the Ad Group level, then the “edit” button within the “Ad Group General Information” section.

And don’t forget to save your changes. They are applied instantly.

Search and ye shall find
If you want to find anything—a keyword, an ad, an ad group or a campaign—at any time you can access the search feature:  From the Dashboard or Campaigns tab, click the Search subtab. On the Search screen, select the search option form the drop-down menu. Enter your keyword in the text field and click the Search button.

Further reading
For more info, be sure top take a look at the resources listed below.

• Quick Start Guide
• Upgrade Tutorial
• Upgrade Webinar
• Upgrade Resources Blog Post

—Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo! Search Marketing Writer

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