Posts filed under 'Did You Know?'

Improving Your Ad Copy

An Improved Feature to Help You Write Better Ads

In August we announced a number of enhancements to the system. Several of these involved improving the ad writing process. By far my favorite of these is the improved whatchamacallit, for lack of a better term, that shows you live ads that use your selected keyword(s). By offering this real-time information, this feature can help you write more effective ads, helping you improve your Quality Index score.

To use the watchamacallit:

• Log into your account.
• Click the Campaigns tab.
• Click on a campaign name.
• Click “Create New Ad” or the “edit” button for an existing ad.
• Click on any of the keywords.

A pop-up will appear showing up to six relevant ads for that keyword.

You can scroll through your keywords using the “Next Keyword” and “Previous Keyword” buttons. Using this feature can help you differentiate your ads from others’ in the same or similar niches when creating a new ad or editing an existing one.

And, by the way, we have found that advertisers who use more features like this one tend to get better results.

For more on this enhancement, visit the Help Center.

—Michael Mattis

Driving Traffic Quality

A Roundup of Our Latest Efforts

Quality traffic.

For you, the advertiser, this means qualified clicks from users most likely to become customers. As a part of our ongoing effort to improve the quality of the network and your traffic, we have undertaken several initiatives. The newest of these is a feature called “Blocked Domains,” which allows you to specify certain sites in our partner distribution network on which you do not want your ads to appear.

The new Blocked Domains feature, which launches later this month, is just the latest among several initiatives we are undertaking in order to in order to provide increased value. Others include:

Discounts
You may automatically receive pricing discounts based on our assessment of the quality of traffic coming from our partner distribution network.

Click protection
We have installed a system to track and identify clicks that we believe shouldn’t be billed to our advertisers.

Intercontinental traffic control
“Blocked Continents,” a recent enhancement, automatically excludes traffic from continents other than North America. If intercontinental traffic is important to your business, however, you can easily change this setting by going into your Administration tab and clicking “Account General Information.”

To learn more about what we’re doing around network quality, I invite you to visit our new Traffic Quality Center.

—Reggie Davis, Vice President, Network Quality

Photo courtesy rrazor, via Flickr

Yahoo.com and Beyond

Yahoo! Search Marketing includes a Whole Network of Sites

As you probably already know, Yahoo! Search Marketing’s advertising reach goes beyond just Yahoo! Search and other Yahoo! sites.

Yahoo! Search Marketing is, to a large extent, an ad distribution network. That means that when you become a Yahoo! Search Marketing advertiser, your ads can appear on Yahoo.com—the world’s most visited website—and they may also appear on other sites in our ad network, like MTV.com, iVillage.com and eBay.com, as well as on other popular content and information sites.  For a longer list and more details, please visit this page in our Products and Services section.

Being part of an ad distribution network, and not just advertising on a single site, can help you reach a wider audience, create better brand awareness, get more customers and increase your sales.

—The Team

Making the Grade

An Intro to Downloading Reports

Everyone can recollect the angst of ‘report card time.’ For those in the workforce, the apprehension around being graded is now reserved for performance evaluations, where monetary bonuses, promotions, and tenure are at stake.

With reporting, it’s your turn to be the boss and make your employees—your campaigns, ads, and keywords, etc.—sweat it out. After all, they’re the ones working for you. If they don’t make the grade, well, what is it that The Donald says?

You can use Yahoo! Search Marketing reports to help evaluate the performance of your chosen keywords, ads, and other marketing activities. You can also track financial statements and transactions.  It’s super simple to generate reports. Selecting a range of dates for the data you wish to view is your largest task in averaging the averages. Specific reports and descriptions of the information they provide follow:
 

Performance Reports
Performance Summary Reports
Use this report to help identify the campaigns that most effectively generate leads, conversions, and revenue.

Daily Performance Reports
This report is a daily summary of impressions, CTR, clicks, and CPC. If you have added analytics tags to your pages, you may also view conversion and revenue data.
 
Keyword Performance Reports
Use this report to help identify the keywords that most effectively generate leads, conversions, and revenue.

Performance by Geographic Location Reports
This report provides account-level summary performance information for your geo-targeted campaign.

Daily Spending Performance Reports
This report is a summary of daily account spend and account daily spending limit over a selected date range.
 
URL Performance Reports
Use this report to see how URLs on your web site are performing.

Ad Performance Reports
Use this report to help identify the ads that most effectively generate leads, conversions, and revenue.

Financial Reports
Monthly Financial Reports
This report provides access to Invoices, Statements, and Activity Reports for your account for prior calendar months, which are downloadable in PDF and text formats.

Billing Transaction Detail Reports
This report provides historical billing transaction data for your account over the date range you select.

To download reports, click on the Reports tab, choose the type of report you want, hit the “Download this Report” link, and then select your desired format.

Remember, data for conversions and revenue cannot be tracked unless you’ve added the analytics tags to your site pages. To generate tags, click the Administration tab, then the Analytics link and specify your settings. Without evaluating your account activity, how will you know if your campaigns are making the grade?

—Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo! Search Marketing Writer

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