Posts filed under 'Events'

Stumble Upon Us in New York Next Week

It’s Who You Know at “SMX Social Media”

If you happen to be feeling sociable in Manhattan next week, drop by Danny Sullivan’s SMX Social Media conference Tuesday and Wednesday, Oct, 16 and 17, at the Metropolitan Pavilion.

This intimate little conference will offer convivial sessions on many aspects of the emerging social media space, including social media marketing essentials, bookmarking and tagging, linkbaiting, micro-communities and more. Be sure and look in on the keynote, Tuesday afternoon at 4:40 p.m., as Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us and Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon spill the social media beans.

Also of note, Marchex SEO manager, Matt McGee, will be offering a case study on Yahoo! Answers in the session, “Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing” at 2:30 p.m. Wednesday.

“I’m going to introduce Yahoo! Answers and show how it can be a beneficial marketing tool to build credibility and positive brand image, get into some best practices and tips on how to make the most of it,” says Matt, who also notes that Yahoo! Answers is consistently among the highest sources of traffic for his blog.
 
Hey, it’s New York—if social media can make it there, it can make it anywhere!

—Michael Mattis

Image courtesy danhellers.com via Flickr

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

Lessons in Yahoo! Search Marketing

New, Free Webinar Series Helps You Get a Handle on Your Campaigns

Starting Tuesday, September 11, we will offer a new, free webinar series for Yahoo! Search Marketers. This hands-on, three-part series will cover the ins and outs of Yahoo! Search Marketing, from beginning to advanced:

Key Terms, Account Interface Overview and Structure

•  How Sponsored Search works
• Account structure and elements at each level
• A high-level review of each main section of the account interface
• Webinar dates/times: 9/18/07 at 1:00 p.m. and 10/9/07 at 11:00 a.m. (all times Pacific)

Creating a New Campaign

• Adding keywords using the keyword selector tool
• Creating two ads to test performance
• Geo-targeting and match types
• Webinar dates/times: 9/11/07 at 11:00 a.m., 9/25/07 at 1:00 p.m. and 10/16/07 at 11:00 a.m. (all times Pacific)

Keyword Tips and Best Practices

• How adding keywords can lead to an increase in traffic and an overall improvement in your account’s effectiveness
• Ensuring keywords are related to your content, theme and purpose of your web site
• Using match types and excluded words
• Webinar dates/times: 9/13/07 at 11:00 a.m., 10/2/07 at 1:00 p.m. and 10/23/07 at 11:00 a.m. (all times Pacific)

Quality Index Score

• Finding your quality index score
• Understanding the factors that influence it
• Best practices for improving it
• Webinar dates/times: 9/17/2007 at 11:00 a.m., 10/11/2007 at 1:00 p.m. (all times Pacific)

Bidding and Forecasting

• Determining your estimated rank in search results
• How to bid at the single and multiple keyword levels
• Understanding forecasting tools such as monthly estimates, etc.
• Webinar dates/times: 9/27/2007 at 11:00 a.m., 10/18/2007 at1:00 p.m. (all times Pacific)

Ad Testing

• Understand the benefits and get tips for using ad testing,
• How to activate ad testing
• Best practices for creating ads to test

Attendance at these webinars is limited, so you’ll want to register ASAP. To register for a specific webinar, click here.

First-time registrants will need to create a password of between 4 and 32 characters. Please write down your password—you will need it to access the webinar.

—The Team

Ad Testing Month

Increased sales start with better ads

Okay, so maybe “Ad Testing Month” doesn’t sound quite as poignant or cool as, say, Alternate History Month (celebrating speculative sci fi), Baby Boomer Recognition Day (no kidding), Cartoon Art Appreciation Week, or I Forgot Day, when you can make up for all the birthdays and anniversaries you forgot during the year. But we’re kind of excited about it.

September is a great time for Ad Testing Month because it comes after the summer break but before the holidays, when you’re getting your business ready for the rush and finding ways to maximize your ROI.

Ad testing, for those of you new to Yahoo! Search Marketing or who have been sipping mai tais in Tahiti all summer, lets you test multiple ads to determine which messages work best. Ad testing happens automatically when you create more than one ad within an ad group. Here’s a handy tutorial on the topic.

Also, check out this past post, which details more about how ad testing works.

Test and Optimize
You can also set the system to display the most successful ads, based on click-through rate, more often. Make sure ad optimization is on (the default setting), log in to your account, choose a campaign and then an ad group. Click “Ad Group Settings” and then click “edit” in the General Information box. Switch “Optimize Ad Display to “On.”

Be sure to take advantage of the helpful new ad writing features that we announced last week and take September to really make your ads as clickable as they can be. It won’t take much extra effort and could help increase your ROI.

—Michael Mattis

Shopkeeper Nation

Have a Yahoo! store? This free webinar may be for you.

Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers are busy. Advertisers also running their own online stores are doubly so. We know it can get frantic, especially trying to tie up all the details.

If you have a Yahoo! online store and are looking to improve your efficiency and maximize your store’s growth, automating your back-office tasks with OrderMotion can help.

To find out more, join Yahoo! Small Business for a complimentary OrderMotion webinar, Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time.

When you join us, you’ll:

• Learn how OrderMotion can make your back-office operations more efficient, manage multiple Yahoo! stores, and maximize your company’s growth with OrderMotion.
• Learn how Yahoo! merchants can successfully cut time and hassle from their back-office operations so they can focus on successfully growing their business.
• Have an opportunity to ask questions in our Q&A session.

Whether you’re operating multiple Yahoo! stores or just looking to increase efficiency from a single store, you won’t want to miss this free webinar.

Click here to register.

—Jim Smiley, Marketing Manager, Yahoo! Small Business

The Way from San Jose

A Recap of Yahoo! at SES San Jose 2007

Last week San Jose (OK, the San Jose Convention Center) was transformed into the nexus of all the latest innovations, strategies and products in the search marketing industry. Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo (SES) proved to be an exciting conference—with practical takeaways for everybody from key search marketing industry experts to folks just starting out with their search marketing campaigns.

Didn’t attend or maybe you did attend and were a bit overwhelmed? No worries. Here are a few session highlights for y’all.

Ads In A Quality Score World
David Pann, vice president, marketplace design and matching, Yahoo! Search Marketing, revealed enhancements to Yahoo! Search Marketing. The new features include:

• PayPal payment integration
• Enhancements to the process for creating an ad
• Low quality index alert—advertisers will be alerted if their ads’ quality index scores drop below certain levels.

When asked about how advertisers can help themselves achieve higher ad quality, David responded, “Testing! We’re trying to drive the maximum relevance to our users. We have been improving this since we launched Panama and we are constantly evolving. The key thing is to drive quality—a good quality experience for the user and the advertiser.”

For more information check out our interactive ad testing tutorial.

Search Engines on Click Fraud
In this session, Reggie Davis, VP, marketplace quality, Yahoo! Search Marketing, summed it up succinctly with, “ad quality + traffic quality = marketplace quality.”

Reggie also talked about the recent launch of the Traffic Quality Center and three goals to which Yahoo! Search Marketing is dedicated:

• Improving communication
• Increasing transparency
• Providing advertisers control

“We have removed poorly performing traffic sources from the network, and we’re being forthcoming with our filtering,” Reggie added, regarding Yahoo! Search Marketing’s commitment to working with our partners to provide more transparency.

Here’s some more info on the launch of our Traffic Quality Center:

Search APIs
Yahoo!’s Managing Director of Sales Technology, Dan Boberg, was one of the panelists, and talked about three of our API Programs: Developer API, Advertiser API and Commercial API.

Yahoo! Search Marketing offers a new Commercial API program, which provides free and open access to our APIs, and offers optional fee-based services, including higher level technical support, product roadmap visibility and joint-marketing opportunities. For more on Yahoo! APIs, we’ve posted a helpful article here. For more information on the API programs, check out this post. 

“Mastering Panama” report by Mona Elessiely – Yahoo! Book Party
Author and search marketer Mona Elessiely was also at SES promoting the launch of her new report, Mastering Panama: A Special Report on Yahoo!’s New Search Marketing Platform.

The book is a handy reference guide to a host of the features offered in our Panama system. For more coverage on Mona’s book click here.

Here’s some more on SES San Jose:

• SES San Jose Blog.
• Online influencer and industry blogger Barry Schwartz’s SES coverage wrap up.

—Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

Miles of Crooked Smiles

Kids’ Crooked House Visits the Burbank Campus

On the surface, it seems so simple. After all, it’s just a nursery rhyme:

There was a crooked man,
Who walked a crooked mile.
He found a crooked sixpence
Upon a crooked stile.

He bought a crooked cat,
Which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together
In a crooked little house.

It’s when you start to think about what that word “stile” means that it gets interesting. Just what is a stile, anyway? A turnstile, of course, is one of those one-way revolving gates that lets people in or out, but not out or in, respectively.

A stile, it turns out, is a border, and the border in the rhyme is the one between Scotland and England. And the crooked house? That’s an allegory, too. It refers to the newly cobbled-together United Kingdom presided over by the doomed King Charles I in the 17th Century.

But we’re not going to let all that weighty knowledge spoil our fun at hosting a genuine, Yahoo! branded, Kids’ Crooked House, right here at on Burbank campus. In fact, this knowledge only adds to the good times.

This wonky little playhouse was built especially for Yahoo! by Glenn Halliday, owner of KidsCrookedHouse.com and one of the winners of our Ultimate Connection contest. If there’s a 90-degree angle in this miniature villa, our little friends here couldn’t find it. It’s been great having it around, and the big Yahoos love it almost as much as the little ones. It’s been a lesson in geometry, poetry, history and fun.

Thanks, Glen, and again, congrats.

—The Team

Do you know the way to San Jose? We do!

Yahoo! at SES, San Jose 2007

Apologies to Mr. Burt Bacharach for borrowing his famous song for this blog article title—I couldn’t resist.

Even if you do know the way to San Jose but need a more detailed map for the state of search engine marketing, maybe Yahoo! Search Marketing can help plan your journey with news, tips and best practices.

If you’re reading this blog and are planning to be in San Jose next week, I’ll bet a pretty search marketing dollar that you’re going to attend the Search Engine Strategies San Jose conference, which is to be held Monday, August 20 through Thursday, August 23.

Of course, Yahoo! Search Marketing will be there. If you’re checking out the exhibit hall, be sure to stop by Booth No. 101—101, like the famous, scenic California highway that can take you all the way to San Jose. A number of Yahoos will be on hand to help answer your questions with all their well-known purple-hued pleasantries. You can also sign up for our one-on-one optimization sessions right at the booth.

With all the new strategies, technologies and emerging platforms out there, crafting your search marketing strategy can be bit hectic. How do you find some peace-of-mind in San Jose? We humbly suggest attending one or more of these informative and insightful sessions featuring Yahoo! panelists:

Monday, August 20

9:00 – 10:30 a.m.
Post-Search Ads
Learn more about products and strategies for search profiling in this session.
Panelist: Richard Frankel, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Yahoo! Search Marketing

9:00 – 10:30 a.m.
Domaining & Address Bar-Driven Traffic
Hear industry experts share their insights on how the domain purchasing business is growing, how it can deliver relevant traffic to advertisers, as well as issues with typo domains and opt-out issues.
Panelist: Sean Moriarty, Director, Business Development, Yahoo! Search Marketing

11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Universal & Blended Vertical Search
See how the different leading search engines are approaching universal and blended vertical search, and how it may impact the industry and consumers.
Panelist: Tim Mayer, VP of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Ads in a Quality Score World
In this panel, get a closer look at quality factors and tips for increasing the perceived relevancy of your campaigns.
Panelist: David Pann, Vice President, Marketplace Design & Matching, Yahoo! Search Marketing

2:00 – 3:30 p.m.
Personalization, User Data & Search
This session looks at existing and possible moves in the personalized search space.
Panelist: Tim Mayer, VP of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

Tuesday, August 21

3:15 – 4:30 p.m.
Search Engines On Click Fraud
In this session, search engines discuss how they deal with click fraud concerns.
Panelist: Reggie Davis, Vice President, Marketplace Quality, Yahoo! Search Marketing

4:45 – 6:00 p.m.
Meet The Search Ad Networks
Representatives from major search engines that sell paid listings and other search advertising discuss new aspects to their programs and answer general questions from the audience.
Panelist: Dan Boberg, Managing Director, Sales Technology, Yahoo! Search Marketing

Wednesday, August 22

10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Search APIs
Major search engines offer application programming interfaces that let you tap into search results, ad listings, ad management systems and other things. This session looks at APIs and how they may help your search marketing strategies.
Panelist: Dan Boberg, Managing Director, Sales Technology, Yahoo! Search Marketing

For more information on traveling to San Jose, be sure to check out all the helpful information at the San Jose section of Yahoo! Travel.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

Back to the Future… And Beyond

There were no flying cars at SMX Advanced, just a lot of great ideas

In 1962, Seattle was the home of the future. Among the exhibits at the Century 21 Exposition was a family home-of-tomorrow sporting, among other miracles, a “vast electronic library.” Other futuristic wonders of the fair included Ford’s six-wheeled, bubble-toped Seattle-ite XX concept car which featured an “onboard-computer with an automatic rolling roadmap,” a rocket ship simulation ride that gave you a glimpse of your vacation among the stars, the famed monorail which would make traffic jams “a thing of the past” and, of course, the Space Needle itself, Mighty Symbol of Progress.

Then reality intervened. The monorail failed to supplant the freeway and dreams of jet packs and rocket ships gave way to crowded airbuses with take-your-shoes-off security. In general, utopian fantasies took a back seat to dystopian ones (Soylent Green is People) and Seattle became identified more with Frasier than The Future.

Still, today, nearly every household has access to a “vast electronic library,” though of a type that few in 1962 could have foreseen. And it’s in the black box of that vast electronic library—now called the Internet—that our little story comes full circle. SMX Advanced, the new conference by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land fame, was held last week in Seattle. It showed just how the vast electronic library can be a “golden land of opportunity and adventure,” provided you know where to search.

And that’s what made the conference so different and special: Its laser-like focus on how to draw more users and customers. Tips literally abounded. My highlights included:

SEO, meet SMM
Short for Social Media Marketing, SMM’s the hot new ticket in town for those wanting to get their messages across using social media—i.e., services that let people share their own content, like Flickr, Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia and so forth. The panel of experts included Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz, Cindy Krum of Blue Moon Works, Stuntdubl’s Todd Malicoat and Neil Patel from ACS/Pronet Advertising.

Among the many nuggets was using Yahoo! Answers to become an expert in your field and draw links at the same time. Neil Patel talked about the do’s and don’ts of SMM (do add lots of “friends;” don’t try to spam the home page by tagging your own content over and over). Cindy Crum finished up by giving a great talk on how to build up your brand via social media and noted that customers and potential customers today are demanding a higher level of interaction with brands.

Bottom line: If you’re not marketing through social media now, you need to think about starting. For more, check out Search Engine Roundtable’s notes and Bruce Clay’s blog.

Better Ways
“Better ways to do boring stuff” is how MC Danny pitched this session. It was an all around Q&A with a bevy of search marketing experts (too many to name them all here). Among the more interesting questions for both publishers and advertisers:

• What tricks or tactics get you a lot of backlinks (without having to do much?)
• There are companies who want to build Flash-heavy sites that aren’t easily read by spiders. Have you had any success stories on getting them to change their minds?
• How many targeted links would you go after per month without penalty?
• How relevant is page freshness to ranking?

For the answers, take a peek at Search Engine Roundtable.

Paid Search Roundtable
It was here that our own Stewart Easterby announced the new Yahoo! Search Marketing open API program, which we talked about on the blog a few days later. This news won some pretty rave reviews at in Seattle and around the SEOsphere. Learn more from Bruce Clay.

Pump Up Your Paid Search
Those using paid search naturally want to get the most out of it. This panel focused on just that. Among the tips:

• Proper set-up is important
• Invest in tangential keywords carefully
• Consider geo-targeting
• In “Panama,” make use of the Alternate Text feature

You can read more about it here, here and here.

More Coverage:

• SMX Blog
• Search Engine Land
• Flickr Photostream
• Technorati
• Video coverage from WebProNews

Granted, there were no pavilions promising the Wonders of Tomorrow, but in all, SMX Advanced was a great kickoff to what promises to be a worthy conference series. Oh, and if you do happen to be in Seattle and find yourself in need of a little future boost, be sure to visit the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, at the foot of the Space Needle right next to the monorail.

—Michael Mattis

Take Search to the Next Level at SMX Advanced

Danny Sullivan’s new conference looks to raise the bar

Long-time search engine guru and former Search Engine Watch editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan has been working the panels at SES for as long as anyone can remember. (Which, in Internet time, translates to about five years.) With his new ventures, Search Engine Land and Search Marketing Expo (SMX), Danny’s working to bring himself, and—by proxy—your search knowledge, to the next level.

Next month, Danny kicks off his first SMX confab, SMX Advanced, in Seattle, June 4 and 5. Don’t let the “expo” in SMX fool you… SMX Advanced promises to be one tight little summit, where attendees will have direct access to some of the best minds in the search world.

Session highlights include:

Monday, June 4
Paid Search Roundtable
Get the latest direct from the major paid search providers, and then grill them mercilessly in an extended discussion period. Stewart Easterby VP, Sales Operations, Yahoo! Search Marketing, will be on hand.

SEO, Meet SMM
Danny Sullivan moderates this panel on the new phenom, SMM, or “social media marketing.” Getting your content into social media can help generate links or provide rankings that you might not be able to tap into with your own site. Among the panelists is linkbaiting champ and sometime YPN Blog contributor, Rand Fishkin.

Yahoo! Search Marketing Networking Reception
The drinks and nosh are on us, but it’s strictly BYOI—”bring your own ideas.”

Tuesday, June 5
Pump Up Your Paid Search!
Learn tips and techniques designed to help pros like you get more out of their paid search campaigns.

Paid Search: The Giant Focus Group
Now’s your chance to tell representatives from the major search ad providers what they should fix, what new features they should provide, and so forth. Come share your ideas with John C. Kim, Senior Director, Advertiser Product Marketing, Yahoo! Search Marketing, among others.

Give It Up!
In this session, a panel of noted SEOs, including occasional YPN blog contributor Jen Slegg, share some of their favorite and largely overlooked SEO tips. Shhh! No blogging allowed from this session!

Finally, be sure to visit us at the Yahoo! Search Marketing team at booth number 23. Hope to see you there!

—Michael Mattis

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