Posts filed under 'Announcements'

Holiday Hours for Customer Support

Special Thanksgiving Day schedule

Because of the Thanksgiving holiday, Yahoo! Search Marketing Customer Support telephones will be offline on Thursday, November 24. We will reopen on Friday, November 22 with normal business hours through the rest of the weekend (Friday 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Pacific Time, Saturday 7:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Pacific Time, and Sunday 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time).

Thanks, and enjoy your holiday dinner with all the trimmings!

—Yahoo! Search Marketing Customer Support

Updates Great and Small

More Customizable, Easier to Navigate

Fast on the heels of our last release, today we announce several new features and enhancements, many based on your requests.

Custom Reports and Scheduling
One popular request from our advertisers is the ability to customize and schedule reports. Well, voila! Starting today, you’ll be able to customize your reports based on date range, filter criteria and data columns. You can also choose to have your reports emailed to you at intervals that you specify: daily, weekly or monthly. In addition, you can choose the format in which you’d like to receive them, including XML, TSV or CSV for Excel.

Going Lateral
Another request from our advertisers is the ability to move laterally from one detail page to another without having to backtrack to a summary page. Now, you’ll notice, we’ve added “Previous” and “Next” buttons to your campaign, ad group and keyword pages to help make it easier to navigate around your account. You will also see the relative location of the particular campaign, ad group or keyword page you’re on in at any given time in relation to the others: for example: “3 of 23 Ad Groups.” You can also navigate this way through search results.

This navigation aid also lets you move more easily among campaigns, ad groups and keywords that are in the top performers or watched lists in your account.

The Today Show
In the calendar widget that appears in the upper right of the page under your Campaigns and Reports tabs, you can now select “Today,” from the “Custom Date Range” drop-down menu. Your default setting will still be the previous two weeks unless you select a custom date range. Whatever range you choose will then become your new default.

A Little Help from Your Friends
We’re always bugging you to make sure your ads meet our editorial guidelines. Now we’re providing easier access to our guidelines from those places in the interface where it is most relevant: the Create Your Ad, Choose Keywords and Editorial Status pages.

Keep the feedback coming, folks. It really helps us improve the system.

—Michael Mattis

More Lessons in Yahoo! Search Marketing

New Webinar Dates Added

Due to popular demand, we’ve added several new dates to our free instructional webinar series for new and experienced advertisers, which goes through November 6. 

For more detail and to register, click here.

—The Team

Brief System Downtime Saturday

Your Yahoo! Search Marketing account will be unavailable for approximately 12 hours, from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time on Saturday, October 6.

This upgrade should not affect the display of your ads on Yahoo! and our distribution network.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

—The Team

A Direct Response to Feeling “Blue”

Yahoo! to Acquire BlueLithium

Fine. We admit it. Yahoo! is out to be the largest and most effective online ad network in the world. 

To further us along in our quest, we recently finalized our acquisition of Right Media, one of the fastest growing display ad networks and clearing houses for publisher ad inventory.

That’s great, but there’s still work to do. Alongside display advertising, “performance marketing” is one of the fastest growing fields online. Performance marketing, sometimes called “direct response,” drives specific transactions, such as getting a certain lead or the sale of an individual product or service.

BlueLithium will bring Yahoo! a ton of expertise in performance marketing and targeting, as well as valuable new audiences. We’ll be able to drive performance-based campaigns both on the Yahoo! network and off.

Eventually, this will mean Yahoo! will become a one stop shop for all advertiser marketing needs. For more on BlueLithium, see Todd Teresi’s post on Yodel Anecdotal.    

—The Team

New Traffic Quality Center Launches

Reggie Davis, our VP of Network Quality, cuts the ribbon

To help us build the highest quality ad network possible and combat the industry-wide issue of click fraud, today we unveil our new Traffic Quality Center. At the Traffic Quality Center, you will be able to:

• Learn how to submit a click investigation request
• Get the latest news on traffic quality
• Access tips and tools that can help you detect click fraud
• Read articles on best practices to help protect your search marketing investment

In addition, you will also find industry articles that shed light on traffic quality issues from many different perspectives.

Our commitment to traffic quality is not new. In fact, since 1998, our Click Protection System has been up and running 24/7 with the goal of filtering out bad clicks—helping to ensure that you’re only billed for the clicks that count. Like all such systems, it continues to evolve with the marketplace.

I hope you’ll take advantage of this valuable new resource and work with us toward our common goals.

—Reggie Davis, VP, Network Quality

Photo Credit: dcfox, via Flickr

Mr. Right (Now)

Yahoo! closes acquisition of Right Media, Inc.

Back in April of this year, Yahoo! announced plans to buy Right Media Inc.  As of today, the acquisition is official and we wanted to share the news with you.

So, how does an open ad exchange provide value for Yahoo! advertisers, publishers and ad networks?

Well, a little back story might help.

Right Media is the creator of a Direct Media Exchange, a self-service publisher product that allows publishers to sign up for, manage and optimize against multiple advertising networks through one interface. Yahoo! recognized the value of the Direct Media Exchange and knew that Right Media would be the “right fit” for its advertisers and publishers.

For advertisers, an open exchange will provide great inventory and audience options from all of participants in this marketplace. Advertisers will also have increased control and visibility into the buying process.

We believe this will provide value to publishers as well, as they will be given an opportunity to bundle their own ad inventory with inventory within the exchange.

Advertising networks benefit through the exchange by having the opportunity to compete with the largest players. The open exchange creates transparency and accountability, which should create a more level playing field for advertisers and publishers—all valuable assets that we can say “Right on!” to. 

–Roger Park (a.k.a., Mr. Right)

Yahoo! SmartAds for Travel

New, More Tailored Display Advertising

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don’t know which half,” goes the old marketing phrase, first minted (probably) by department store pioneer, John Wanamaker back in the 19th century.

Yahoo! Search Marketing was founded on the belief that if you put relevant ads online and in front of people who are searching for your services, they will respond much more enthusiastically. Not only that, but the results would be quantifiable in ways Mr. Wanamaker could only have begun to dream.

So far so good.

But not good enough. Today we up the ante. Yahoo’s new SmartAds enable advertisers and agencies to connect with their customers through display ads in a more tailored and relevant way. This new ad product enables advertisers and agencies to market in a customized way in real-time with highly relevant, targeted ads on Yahoo! 

For the time being, this product is available for travel advertisers, and we anticipate rolling out Smart Ads to other verticals down the road.

For the complete low-down on this high value product, visit the Yahoo! SmartAds web site and check out the Demo.

Eat your heart out, Wanamaker.

—Michael Mattis

Panama Opens New Locks

You can now copy and move keywords from one ad group to another, plus some other cool stuff

Hallelujah!

It’s like getting a pebble out of your shoe, or a bit of sand out of your eye. Along with some other new features launched today, you can now move and copy keywords from one ad group to another without doing the dreary copy/paste/delete thing. What a relief.

On the Ad Group page under your Campaigns tab, you’ll now see “Move” and “Copy” buttons. As the names imply, these let you move your keywords from one ad group to another and copy them as appropriate. Note that you’re still limited to 1000 keywords per ad group.

 Select a keyword you want to move by clicking the check box next to it. The first time you hit the “Move” button you’ll get a pop up that shows some useful instructional text. You may opt not to view this in future. You’ll then be taken through an easy step-by-step process for moving your keyword.

Keyword selection streamlined
In the early days of internal combustion, auto manufacturers quickly figured out that cars performed better when they were pointier at the front and tapered at the rear, helping them slip through the air more efficiently, like a fish. While we haven’t exactly done the same thing with our new keyword selector tool—there’s no tapering involved—we have made selecting keywords an easier process.

The new keyword selector tool is accessible to new advertisers in the online sign-up process, and to existing advertisers creating a new campaign or using the “+Add Keywords” button on the Ad Group page.

L’il help here 
In addition, we’ve also sprinkled a helping of… well, help, to provide some guidance in writing your ads. You can now view current ads of other advertisers using the same keyword or keywords.

In addition, these pages now offer best practices for writing the most effective Sponsored Search ads, and “ghost text” appears in the “Title” and “Description” fields to provide examples of what these fields should contain, plus a few other little goodies to explore.

Check back to the blog for more updates and enhancements soon.

—Michael Mattis

Short Descriptions Now Live

Ad descriptions longer than 70 characters on Yahoo! in the U.S. will now be cut off

Starting today, ads that appear in U.S. Yahoo! Search results with descriptions longer than 70 characters will be cut off (”truncated”) at the nearest complete word, followed by an ellipsis. The optional 190-character long descriptions may still be displayed on some of our distribution partners’ sites.

If you have not amended your ads to include short descriptions, you’ll want to do so now. For more details and to learn how to add short descriptions, refer back to our previous posts, here, here and here.  

—Michael Mattis

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