Posts filed under 'Announcements'

New Advertisers, Welcome Aboard

The new Sponsored Search platform is now available to all U.S. marketers who open new accounts with us

Step by step, the introduction of Yahoo! Search Marketing’s new account interface and platform continues. This time, the event we’re celebrating is the launch of the upgraded sign up experience for new U.S. advertisers who have not used our product in the past. Beginning today, all new U.S. Sponsored Search sign-ups will use the new flow and immediately begin managing their accounts through the easy-to-use, more powerful platform.

Hey, What about Us?
If you are a current U.S. advertiser who hasn’t yet upgraded, your time is coming. We began the process of upgrading U.S. advertisers to the new Sponsored Search in October, and invitations to upgrade will continue to be sent in stages to U.S. advertisers over the remainder of this year and early next year. You will receive your individual upgrade date via email at least one week in advance. But if you want it now, you can still request an early upgrade, and we’ll try to accommodate your request.

The Big Five
Ready to sign up? There are five basic steps to getting your campaign up and running with Sponsored Search:

1. Target ads by location
Geo-Targeting allows you to target your ads to potential customers located or interested in particular geographic areas. Example: If your business sells real estate within the state of California and you select California as a geo-targeted region, your ads will be shown to potential customers located in California, as well as to search users that may be located outside of California but enter search terms such as “California Real Estate.”(1)

2. Select keywords for your ad groups
You select the keywords that best describe your products and services.

3. Set pricing and budget
Because you determine the price you are willing to pay for each click, Sponsored Search can offer an affordable way for your business to reach customers. You only pay when your ad is clicked, and your spend should not exceed the amount you budget for each ad group.

4. Write the ad copy for each of your ad groups
Your ads are comprised of titles, descriptions and display URLs that describe your site and what you have to offer. Effective ads are short, factual and objectively written. Remember to include your company name in your descriptions.

5. Review your ad(s) and create your account
After you review your ads and provide us with some basic information to get your account activated, we’ll run them through a standard editorial review, then your ads are distributed across our vast network of sites. A Sponsored Search buy can display your listings on popular sites like Yahoo!, CNN.com, Disney.com, Infospace and many others.

For more information on a new account sign up, please view our Sign-Up Tutorial.

Leave the Driving to Us
Need some help getting started? With the assisted setup sign-up option, Yahoo! Search Marketing specialists will build a campaign that’s customized to your budget and goals. Our specialists will:

• Select relevant keywords.
• Write effective ads (titles and descriptions).
• Determine bid amounts that work best with your budget.

To take advantage of assisted setup, just select “Assisted Setup” on the sign-up page and follow the instructions. You’ll receive a proposed campaign in two to five business days, and a specialist will contact you to discuss it.

With more than 38 million people using search engines daily(2), and 67% of U.S. adults who research online before making a purchase decision using search engines as a research tool(3), it seems clear that search marketing is one of the best-performing Internet marketing tactics.

— Jeff Hecox

Footnotes:
1. Geo-targeting accuracy is not guaranteed, and may vary depending on the level of targeting selected, as well as other factors.
2. “Search Engine Users,” PEW Internet & American Life Project Report, January 2005
3. “How America Searches: Online Shopping,” iCrossing, based on Harris Interactive poll, August 26-30, 2005

New Manage Bids Now Live

Changes made to smooth your upgrade

Two weeks ago we noted some changes would be coming to your Sponsored Search Manage Bids pages. These changes are now live.

Please note that since we announced this upgrade, there have been a few last-minute enhancements to the planned roll-out. To get a handle on the changes, check out our revised blog post and be sure to visit our FAQs.

—The Team

Turkey Day Hours for Customer Support

Special holiday schedule

Everybody needs something to be thankful for. You know: life, liberty and the pursuit of qualified leads. A day off with the family once in awhile is something to be thankful for, too.

With that in mind, please be advised that Yahoo! Search Marketing Customer Support telephones will be offline on Thursday, November 23. We will reopen on Friday, November 24 with normal business hours through the rest of the weekend (Friday 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time, Saturday 5:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time, and Sunday 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time).

Thanks, and enjoy your holiday.

-Yahoo! Search Marketing Customer Support

Questions and Answers

Getting the most out of our relationship through the blog

Wow. What an adventure this has been already, after just a week and a half. Our first post, which went up October 25, has garnered no fewer than 123 comments thus far. It’s an overwhelming response, far better than any we’d imagined. We’re flattered by your kudos and challenged by your criticisms. Please keep both of them coming.

This has been the first opportunity for us to communicate with each other directly, and in a whole new way. We’ll be reviewing your feedback on the blog and providing information to help improve our relationship and mutual success.

Got Questions?
So what are your most burning questions? Asking them is easy—you can do it right under this post by clicking on the “comments” link.

We’ve found that there have been many simple questions that are easy to answer—many of which are addressed in our FAQs and in our Help Center, or which can be referred to our Customer Solutions folks. We’ve tried to answer as many of these as we can in the comments themselves. In addition, there have been some similar “themes” running through the comments thus far. We will consolidate and address these in future postings, so stay tuned.

Rules of Engagement
Some of you may have noticed that a few comments—four, actually—have been deleted. Of these, two were spam. The other two, however, violated our Terms of Service. We don’t mind criticism. We’re a big, grown-up company now and want nothing more than to learn from experience. And we don’t like to delete comments. It goes against the open communication philosophy that the Web is supposed to embody. But, as a big company with a lot of responsibilities, we’ve got to take care.

The long and short of commenting on the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog is summed up in the blurb at the bottom right-hand margin of this page: Comments that are off-topic, inappropriate, or which otherwise violate our Terms of Service may be removed.

Lastly, it’s important that when you do comment, you give us a valid and up-to-date email address, so that we can personally contact you if we need to respond to a specific problem or issue. We have a procedure set up for forwarding these issues to the right Yahoos, and we do want to help you when possible.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation with our guidelines, and for your insightful comments. In return, we commit to responding to your assessments—both good and bad—as frequently and frankly as possible.

–Michael Mattis

The Road Ahead

What you’ll be reading here, and why it’s so important that you keep coming back

We’ll try to keep this missive short and to the point: We want this blog to be a win/win/win/win proposition.

We want advertisers to win, by receiving quality traffic, both from Yahoo! properties and from third-party publishing partners, large and small. We want our publishing partners to win, as they drive that quality traffic to you, our advertisers. Bottom line: if advertisers win and publishers win, then Yahoo! users win, and we win, too.

But winning doesn’t mean we can stand still — Internet marketing is evolving faster every day. To stay ahead, we’ll be introducing a ton of new features and enhancements in the days, weeks and months ahead, many of which may impact your business. Although these changes are positive — designed to help everyone get more out of this relationship — they’re still changes that you’ll want to act upon. We started this blog to help show you how to get more out of us.

Some of the changes you’ll see in the short term include:

• A new control panel
  Using this completely redesigned, easy-to-navigate control panel will help you see what’s working and what’s not.
• Really fast ad activation
  Your ads should now go live within minutes.
• Easy ad testing
  You’ll be able to test multiple versions of an ad to find the message that works best.
• Accurate geo-targeting
  Target your customers broadly or narrowly on a geographic basis, and customize your ads to control costs.
• Campaign budgeting, forecasting and scheduling
  You’ll be able to create, budget and schedule your individual advertising campaigns for greater control over your advertising strategy and spending.
• See-through visibility
  The new interface will help you understand how well your ads are performing relative to your competitors’.

This blog will aim to keep you informed about these and other changes — and help you optimize your ad performance with them. In addition, we designed this blog to help you keep up on the latest information, opinions and trends in the field. We’ll be bringing you news and insight from inside Yahoo! and outside, from the blogosphere. As an added bonus, we’ll include helpful guest posts from prominent Yahoo! and industry experts.

So enjoy the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog and return often. Or, better yet, add us to your RSS feed to get updates automatically.

Lastly — and we know this goes against most corporate rules — feel free to comment on our posts, sharing your insights with your fellow advertisers. We’ll keep a close eye on your feedback and use it to build a stronger marketing solutions network.

There have been quite a few comments and questions since we launched the blog last week. We’ll answer as many of these questions as we can and in a format that makes sense. Stay with us.

Cheers!

– Michael Mattis and Jeff Hecox

A Whole New Reason to Say Yahoo!

The Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog is officially launched

Connection.

It’s what you need between you and your customers/prospective customers. Connection — to the products and people that help you market through Yahoo! — is also what we intend to provide to you in this blog.

We’ll connect you to the people and products that can help you make sense of the ever-changing world of digital marketing, and take advantage of everything that Yahoo! has to offer. While we’re not the first blog in the Yahoo! family (see the Blogroll to the right), we are no less excited about launching ours, because we believe it is the ideal method for informally communicating with our customers and other influencers.

Why Now?
The introduction of our new marketing platform makes this the perfect time to jump feet-first into the blogosphere. It represents a huge first step in providing solutions to the marketing challenges you face now, and those you’ll face as media continues to evolve. We believe that our completely redesigned marketing platform sets a new industry standard, with numerous advanced, easy-to-use features that will help you better connect with Yahoo!’s vast and valuable audience.

During the first few months, we’ll use the blog primarily to inform and educate you about the many features and benefits of our new platform, and the important administrative details that you’ll need to know before your upgrade date. We encourage you to bookmark this page, or better yet, subscribe to the blog via RSS, so you can have all the info you need to hit the ground running.

As we move past the upgrade, we will begin to take a broader look at online marketing and the challenges you face. We’ll examine how 21st Century media such as Tivo, satellite radio and the Internet are contributing to the challenges faced by traditional marketing channels like TV, radio and newspapers. Audiences are fragmenting, and advertisers both large and small are looking for understanding and insight into alternate solutions that will provide the connections they need to their target markets.

Yahoo! offers a variety of marketing products that are suitable for businesses of all sizes, including display, video and many others. The innovation here never stops, and this blog will be the first place to hear about it.

A Two-Way Street
The community that a blog helps create is equally important to us. Through the comments section of each post, readers will be able to share their opinions and ideas with our folks here, as well as with other online marketers. The blog gives you a direct pipeline to Yahoo! execs, and provides an opportunity to help shape future product offerings. We pledge to regularly respond to your comments and questions in an honest and direct way.

Our commitment to you is to make this interactive — and worth your precious time — and we invite you to help shape the content of the blog…what would you like to know about? Just add your comments directly to one or more of the blog posts.

As always, thank you for your business. We’ve begun inviting U.S. advertisers to upgrade their accounts to the new Sponsored Search, and invitations will continue to be sent in stages to U.S. advertisers over the remainder of the year and early next year. We look forward to delivering it to you soon.

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