Posts filed under 'How To's'

Documenting Happiness

Frito-Lay uses Flickr to get customers to engage

This from BrandWeek:

Snack brand Lay’s is tapping a somewhat unexploited social media outlet—photo-sharing site Flickr—for a new push asking consumers to document their happiness.

This month, the Frito-Lay brand is asking consumers to submit photos of themselves—or family members and loved ones—enjoying life’s happy moments, be it surfing or mixing cookie batter, in a digital push called “The Happiness Exhibit.”

Using Flickr, consumers can upload photos around specific themes such as Mother’s Day or American summers on The Happiness Exhibit portion of its site. Lay’s will then run some of these photos in double-page spreads in upcoming issues of People magazine. The Mother’s Day submissions, for instance, appear in the May 10 edition. The campaign will also extend to include photos on the backs of Lay’s packaging this summer as well.

An excellent use of social media, photo sharing and blending online and offline media to promote the brand through user content. And potato chips… Yum!

— The Team

(Image by adison from the Frito-Lay “Happiness Exhibit” on Flickr)

Getting Results Through Search, Pronto

How Yahoo’s enhanced pricing structure helped make Pronto’s digital advertising more efficient

Shopping comparison network Pronto Inc. realized a dynamic drop in CPCs and increased ROI with Yahoo!’s enhanced pricing structure. This enhancement, combined with optimization advice from a Yahoo! representative, helped Pronto to increase its overall ROI without increasing spend.

The Challenge
Pronto Inc., a comparison shopping network whose key sites include Pronto.com, ProntoStyle.com, ProntoHome.com and ProntoTech.com, wanted to increase the efficiency of its digital advertising, reaching more customers online without increasing its overall digital advertising spend. The company has more than ten million keywords across its four key web properties. “In one of the most competitive marketplaces, online shopping comparison, we needed to increase our advertising efficiency,” says Darren MacDonald, Pronto’s Vice President of Search Marketing Operations. “And we wanted Yahoo!, with its huge audience, to help show us the way.”

The Solution
In this highly competitive niche, keeping down cost-perclick (CPC)—the price advertisers pay for each qualified click—is vital. To help make it easier for advertisers to find more targeted customers, improve their search advertising performance, and keep CPCs down, Yahoo! unveiled a new pricing structure in 2009 that allowed advertisers to better align what they pay to the value of clicks they receive. The enhancement, combined with the optimization tips provided by a Yahoo! representative, allowed Pronto to advertise more efficiently withoutincreasing overall digital ad spend.

The Results
Taking advantage of the dynamic pricing enhancement, Pronto experienced a significant decrease in CPC across its four Web properties. This in turn allowed the company to re-invest in its bidded keywords, raising overall return on investment (ROI), without increasing its overall advertising budget.

“Our CPCs dropped ten to fifteen percent toward the end of Q4, which allowed us to increase our bids,” says Pronto’s MacDonald. “This combined with the roll-out of our new microsites, increased our ROI between five and eight percent.”

With more than ten million bidded keywords, a few percentage points improvement in ROI made all the difference. In addition to enhanced pricing, Yahoo! gave Pronto access to a vast network of engaged users and billions of monthly searches.

”We’re very happy with the performance gains that the enhanced pricing structure helped us get,” says MacDonald. “And our Yahoo! representative worked diligently to help us optimize our results.”

About Yahoo! Enhanced Pricing: Yahoo’s enhanced pricing structure allows advertisers to better align what they pay to the value of clicks they receive. Adjustments are made to click charges based on traffic performance from across the Yahoo! network. These include discounts on click charges for lower performing traffic, and potential premiums on click charges for higher performing traffic. Pricing adjustments are based on the performance of the traffic source, and are not affected by the quality of the ads.

About Pronto Inc: Pronto Inc. is a leading shopping comparison network offering more than 70 million products on its collection of sites. Across Pronto.com, ProntoStyle.com, ProntoTech.com and ProntoHome.com consumers can find premium brands at competitive prices. Developed by IAC/InterActiveCorp (IAC) and launched in 2006, Pronto.com and its network of sites is one of the top 100 most trafficked US properties.

— The Team

Getting There With Search

Six steps you can take to help search engines find and index your content

You’re trying to get your website noticed and search engines are an excellent channel for visibility. In this article, we’ll look at some basic things you can do to make sure your content is being indexed by search engines. The more of the items you can implement below, the more noticeable your site will be to the search engines. 

1. Check your “Robots.TXT” file
One little line of code in a simple txt file can be very costly if it’s blocking your site from search engines. A robots.txt file allows you to tell search engines to crawl or not crawl certain directories or files in your site.

For example, this simple line of code disallows all crawlers (a.k.a. robots):

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
To find your robots.txt file simply type in your domain followed by /robots.txt. For example, here is the robots.txt file for the W3C: www.w3.org/robots.txt. For more details on what can be in this file and how search engines treat it visit robotstxt.org.

2. Make sure your content is indexable
Although search engines have come a long way over the years in terms of indexing all kinds of content on the web, there are still some types of content that may not be fully indexed or not indexed at all. If you are seeing missing content when you look at the search engine’s cache of your page, you may want to check if the content is presented in one of the tough-to-index ways below.

This is also true for people using screen readers due to a disability. A screen reader “sees” the page much in the same way a search engine crawler does – by crawling content and deciphering the elements.

JavaScript
Some JavaScript is crawled by search engines today and more will likely be in the future, but JavaScript (including its related scriping technique AJAX) can still present an issue.  Because most content in JavaScript is usually not indexed, things like navigation, on-page apps, and any other content presented by using JavaScript may not be seen and therefore cannot contribute to the context of the page (or sometimes cannot be followed, in the case of links) for search engines.

Flash
With better indexing capabilities coming about recently, Flash sites are becoming more prevalent in SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages), although a site built entirely in Flash is still probably not the best idea if you care about search engine traffic.

Today search engines primarily attempt to index links and text from Flash files. While this is better than it used to be, 100 percent of content still may not be indexed depending on how your Flash site is created. Navigation through “pages” in a Flash file is all contained within a single swf file that lives on one URL, eliminating separate topical content for separate pages.  This can be problematic when you’re up against competitors with much more targeted topical and sub-topical content living on distinct URLs (with links to each of those specific URLs providing even more context).

To minimize indexing difficulties, try to use Flash in smaller pieces. Make sure each topical page of your site has its own unique URL first, then put Flash elements on each page if you like.  Beware though—the more of your content you put in Flash, the less content and context you may be providing to the search engines. 

Image Text
It’s rare to see the entire content of a page posted as a .jpg or other image these days, but it still happens. And when it does, a crawler goes through the code and just sees an image instead of seeing all of the pictures, content, and link text on the page. Search engines simply cannot read any textual content you present in an image, whether it is the entire content of the page or just titles or headers.  You will see the images displayed when you check the cached version of a page.  This is because it is displaying the actual image that is cached, not reading the text content within it.

3. Strenghten your link structure
Links to and from your pages are very important for the “findability” of your pages.  If a page has no links connecting it with any other indexed pages on the web, it may not be found by search engines, since they follow links to discover new content. 

Internal links
Make sure you have a sensible linking structure in place on your site that is crawlable, links to top level as well as deeper level pages, and links to content relevant to the page the links are on.

Crawlable links are links that can be seen by search engines, meaning they’re not in JavaScript or in unindexable links within a Flash file. Also link to different pages within your site, not just from the home page, but all pages. Deeper pages in a site tend to be tougher to find and index, since they are linked to less often, or from more obscure pages in a site. Try to include links to pages most relevant to the content of each page, to give the search engines better context, and to provide a good mix of deeper links. 

You can also include a sitemap page on the site (similarly named xml sitemap files are discussed later).  Provide the sitemap link from your home page and/or from a header or footer on all pages.

External links
If you provide worthwhile content, your site and the pages within it will attract links naturally.  These links from external sites help search engines find and classify your site, especially if your site is newly published. To kick-start your visibility,you can add your site to  trusted directories like The Open Directory Project and Yahoo! Directory.  If it is relevant, you can also add your site to online local listings pages like Yelp, Yahoo! Local or CitySearch. 

Promote your website in your advertising campaigns, add it to your business card, and provide any other means for visibility that you can. If people find your site interesting and useful they will link to it.

To see what your inlinks looks like, go to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ and type in your URL. Click on the Inlinks button.  Use the dropdowns to look at links to one page or the entire site, or to look at links from all pages, all pages except that subdomain, or all pages except that domain.

4. Create a  sitemap XML file
The major search engines we’re addressing here all support xml sitemap files. These sitemap files are different from the onsite sitemap pages previously described. They are xml files that contain a list of the URLs on your site along with a small amount of information about the URLs that is placed on your server and crawled by search engines. This allows you to tell search engines about your URLs, even if they haven’t crawled them naturally by following links on the Web.

Visit sitemaps.org for more information, or see Yahoo!, Google, and Bing’s support of sitemaps.

5. Verify your “nofollow” and “noindex” tags
Noindex and nofollow tags can be used to block search engines from crawling specific links or content. 

Noindex
The noindex meta tag tells search engines not to index a page.  It looks like this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” />

To check for noindex tags on any of your pages, right click on the page in the browser and choose “View Source”.  Search for noindex on the page.

For more information on the search engines’ support of noindex, see these Yahoo!, Google and Bing pages mentioning it.

Nofollow
Nofollow tags can be found in a robots meta tag at the page level, or within the <a> tag at the link level.

Nofollow at the page level tells search engine robots not to follow any of the links in the body of the page that the nofollow meta tag is on.  It looks like this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />

Nofollow at the link level tells search engine robots not to follow that particular link that the nofollow attribute is applied to.  It looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>link text</a>

To check for nofollows on any page, you can look at the source code of the page by right clicking on the page and choosing “View Source.” Then do a search for the word nofollow in the source code.

For more information on nofollows, see this Wikipedia article, or see Yahoo!,  Google and Bing’s  support of nofollow.

6. Specify your site’s language
You can also help search engines by specifying what language your site is written in. This is a simple meta tag that looks like this:

<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en”>

See all ISO codes at the Library of Congress site for more information.

To check for language meta tags on any page, you can look at the source code of the page by right clicking on the page and choosing “View Source.” Then do a search for the word language (or content-language) in the source code.

Still having problems?
If you’ve tried everything above and believe you still have indexing issues, browse the webmaster guidelines below for more information, troubleshooting, and contact information for the search engines. 

Search Engine Guidelines for webmasters

• Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines
• Google Webmaster Guidelines
• Bing guidelines for successful indexing

For more on getting your site noticed, refer to Laura Lippay’s previous post “Is Your Site Invisible?”

— Laura Lippay, Director of Technical Marketing

(Image by Kapungo via Flicker, CC 2.0)

Five Ways Advertisers Can Save Time

Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop simplifies multiple campaign management

If you’re an advertiser running more than one campaign, you will probably welcome the new Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop, a free offline tool that lets you spend less time on the tactical details of campaign management, and more on increasing your return-on-investment.

With Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop, it now takes just a few clicks to modify multiple campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads at the same time. And if you get carried away, you can even undo selected changes with no harm done.

Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop puts an intuitive face on five major campaign management tasks:

• Bulk editing: Easily make mass changes to settings such as status, match types and budgets within an intuitive interface; increase or decrease multiple keyword bids; and export your view of keywords, ads, ad groups and campaigns into Excel for use however you wish.
• Campaign transfer: Import your third-party campaign data in one easy step.
• Keyword research: Use our keyword suggestion engine to find and add new, relevant keywords to your campaigns; get URL-based keyword suggestions to increase your keyword relevance and improve your performance; and export the keyword suggestions into Excel to share this information or to add tracking URLs.
• Find, replace and search: Find and replace text in ads, keywords, ad groups and campaigns; search for specific campaigns, ad groups, ads, or keywords in your account; or search for information in any of the account tabs.
• Account performance statistics: Retrieve status and statistics for your account’s impressions, clicks, CTR, cost, ad quality scores and other information.

By using Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop you’ll have more time to analyze campaign performance, test your ads, and do all the other things that can help make campaigns succeed. Or, you could go do something else entirely!

Ready to get started? Download the free Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop, or register now for a webinar that will introduce you to the tool and its benefits.

–-Chris Marlowe, Staff Writer

(Stopwatch image by Casey Marshall via Flickr, CC 2.0)

Optimize Your Way to a Cleaner Account

Keeping your list of blocked domains up-to-date

Some things are just plain messy. And unlike the savvy behind keeping previous W-2s neatly filed and probably the sanity behind saving—even electronically—old credit card statements for at least some time, there’s less to be said for clutter.

Desks strewn with random bits of paper and neon-colored post-it notes taped to every empty surface evidently work wonders for some. For others, it’s an impediment to productivity. Which might be why Spring cleaning has become an actual event for many.

Here at Yahoo!, we’re offering our own version of staying organized. Specifically as it relates to the list of blocked domains you’ve accrued within your account. As you know, we recommend using conversion data paired with the information within the recently launched Ad Delivery Report (ADR) to make sound decisions around which domains to block. And to help make sure that your list is as fresh, crisp and clean as possible, we’re happy to optimize those domains for you on a bi-monthly basis.

Optimize?

Yes, that’s our fancy little way of describing what one of our talented teams will do for you, at your request. That is, we’ll go through your list of blocked domains and highlight any that are no longer a part of our publisher network. Once you remove these, it will free up space, allowing you even more room to block those referring domains which don’t meet your conversion criteria.

Within a short time-frame, your account’s blocked domains list will be squeaky clean.
Which could possibly be as refreshing as purging old, indecipherable conference call notes, or getting rid of those crumpled Starbucks receipts that somehow accumulate at the bottom of your wallet.

Think of it as spring cleaning but offered year-round. To get started with a clean sweep, contact your Yahoo! account manager.

—Malin Kennedy, Senior Manager, Advertiser Experience

Buying Time

Case Study: Digital media agency Sitewire wields the Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop Tool to cut its campaign management workload by a factor of ten

In the decade or so since its invention, untold numbers of businesses large and small have taken advantage of pay-per click advertising to generate more website visits and sales. Unfortunately, these companies sometimes found themselves to be victims of their own success: Having experienced good results with paid search marketing, they broadened their keyword lists and campaigns, only to find them increasingly difficult and time-consuming to effectively manage.

Sitewire, a digital media agency based in Tempe, Arizona, found itself as part of the group of companies carrying this “mixed bag.” It initially managed the Yahoo! Sponsored Search campaigns of its many clients, including the Darden Restaurant Group (Olive Garden, Red Lobster, etc.), via the import campaign feature available to all advertisers. While the performance of the campaigns was generally good, as more keywords, ad copy versions, landing page URLs and targeting parameters were added, using the Sponsored Search interface became increasingly time-consuming and prone to errors.

The right tool for the job
The Sitewire team expressed their concerns to their Yahoo! account manager, who suggested that they become one of the first Sponsored Search clients to try the beta version of the Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop, an application that allows users to easily and cost effectively create and manage Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns in bulk. The results were instantaneous and dramatic. “Without the tool, uploading account changes or new campaigns might take an hour,” says Andrew Freeman, a Media Planner at Sitewire. “Using the desktop tool, the same amount of work is done in only five minutes. It’s a huge time-saver to just push a button and have the campaign changes uploaded, versus the three steps that were required with the bulk upload sheet. We then have more time to do other tasks that help make our campaigns succeed, like performance analysis, keyword research and A/B testing.”

Quality control
One of the biggest contributors to the time savings is the tool’s accuracy and ability to instantly spot errors. “When you’re uploading in the traditional interface, you end up with a lot of errors, because the converter [for campaigns from other providers] doesn’t always work properly,” says Tammy Trujillo, Senior Media Planner at Sitewire. “Since we don’t have these mistakes in the desktop tool, it enables us to save a lot of time.”

Sitewire’s team uses the tool’s search feature to check their work and make sure no incorrect settings are missed. “The Desktop Tool is a much easier format than the bulk sheet to see if campaigns, landing page URLs and other things are set right,” says Trujillo. “There are also lots of things you can do with the tool that you can’t do in the bulk sheet, like pausing keywords or ads.” Also helpful to Sitewire was the Desktop Tool’s Getting Started Guide, which enabled the team to hit the ground running. “The guide also saved us time, in that we didn’t have to spend more of it doing a lot of trialand- error,” says Trujillo. “That—and our Yahoo! account manager Michelle Campbell—helped us work through the intricacies of the tool.”

Time Enough at Last
In this modern world where people never seem to find the time to accomplish everything on their todo lists, the Search Marketing Desktop Tool proves its worth over and over again. “The tool is a great solution for us,” says Freeman. “We can import a third-party campaign in two or three minutes, versus the 30 minutes it used to take. We’re more efficient with our time, and as a result, our clients’ campaigns are more efficient.”

About Sitewire: Sitewire is a digital media agency, focusing on local, mobile, social, and search communication strategies. The company’s notable clients include the Darden Restaurant Group (which includes Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Longhorn Steakhouse, The Capital Grille, and Bahama Breeze), and Sage.

To learn more about how the Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop Tool can augment your search marketing efforts, and install it now, visit the Desktop Tool home page.

For more on recent upgrades and enhancements, check out our January blog post and video.

— The Team

Is Your Site Invisible?

Easy ways to determine if search engines can find your site

If search engines can’t find your site, it may as well be the Invisible Man. Search engines like Yahoo!, Google, Bing and others are often a primary source of traffic and determine your ranking. Unfortunately, publishing your files to the Internet does not guarantee that the search engines are going to find them. 

Search engines crawl the Web, indexing pages and following links to find more pages. That’s their job. Pages that are newly published can appear in a search engine’s index (and in search results) within minutes, but sometimes it takes hours or even days.

This article will help you to get an idea of whether the search engines are finding your site, and what they see. In the examples below we’ll look at Yahoo!, Google and Bing, the three search engines with the highest market share in the U.S.

How to tell if your pages are being found by search engines
To determine if your site is indeed being indexed, do this simple search in the search box on any of the search engines by putting “site:” before your URL. Specific instructions like this are called “operators.” By typing that before the URL, you’re using what’s known as the “site operator.”

Example: site:yoursite.com

Don’t leave any spaces in the query. It should look like this:

The results will bring back pages from that site only. If you do not see any results from a site:yoursite.com search, then the search engine is not finding your site. 

Google does not show duplicate pages in these results, but it does allow you to see what’s been filtered. In order to see all pages, including ones Google deems as duplicates, look for a link after your very last search result listing that says, repeat the search with the omitted results included.  Click on that link to see all pages that Google considers duplicates of the ones listed in the initial query results. 

Or simply add &filter=0 to the end of the URL in your browser address bar and hit enter.

If you don’t see the “repeat the search with the omitted results included” link or do not see any changes when you add &filter=0 to your URL string, then you don’t have any previously filtered duplicate pages. This is a good thing because duplicate pages can split your in-link value among many landing pages instead of one, potentially hurting the rankings of your canonical landing page.

Is your content being crawled by search engines?
Search engines may find your page URLs when they crawl the Web following links, but they may not have the content of your pages indexed. To determine what search engines are actually indexing, you can click on the “cache” link on listings in search results.

If you’re looking for any page on your site–You can use the same site: operator referenced above.

If you’re looking for a specific page on your site–You can do a search for the page by entering the exact URL in the search box.

If you’re looking for specific content on your site—Enter the site: operator followed by an exact phrase in quotes in the search box (no spaces).

To check what each search engine has cached, click on the cache link under the result you’re interested in.  Here are screenshots of the cache link on Yahoo! (Google and Bing look pretty much the same).

When you click on the cached page, you will see the content that the search engine has actually indexed. Compare that to the page you see in your browser when you visit the page itself.  Do you see any content missing?

Note the content may have changed since the last time the search engine crawled your page. Search engines also sometimes choose not to index “noise” on a page such as advertisements. What is important to look for here is that the topical content of the page at the time the crawler visited was indeed indexed. If there is important content missing, there could be various reasons why.

Read the Search Engine Guidelines referenced below for more information, and stay tuned for the next SEO article where we’ll discuss steps you can take to make sure you’re doing everything you can to help the search engines index and crawl your content. 

Search engine guidelines for webmasters

• Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines
• Bing guidelines for successful indexing
• Google Webmaster Guidelines

—Laura Lippay, Director of Technical Marketing

(Image courtesy ‘J’, via Flickr, CC 2.0)

Don’t Set it and Forget it

Four simple steps to help your campaign keep up with new searches

I can’t possibly be the only person that remembers the line “just set it and forget it”.  Those were the good ol’ days—the same days as when you could just set up a search marketing campaign and leave it alone. 

Not anymore. Users are more sophisticated in their searches now, and we’ve seen that up to 20% of searches in any given month can be search queries never seen before by a search engine.  This means if you leave your campaign untouched, you could be missing 20% more traffic.

So what’s the best way to keep up to speed with the changing search tide while maintaining your sanity?  Here are our four simple steps that will help your Yahoo! Search Marketing campaign keep pace.

If you’re a do-it-yourselfer, you can use our new Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop tool.  It allows you to easily execute bulk changes and optimizations within an intuitive desktop interface, spending less time on the tactical details of campaign management while maximizing your returns.  And if you happen to have your campaigns managed by SEM Agencies, you can check with them to see if they are doing all these things to give you the best performance.

1.  First off, let’s set up the campaign properly
Start off making sure your campaign is opted into Advanced Match (this is the default setting).  Advanced Match campaign will display ads for a broader range of searches relevant to your keywords, titles and descriptions, or web content than you may have thought of yourself. This includes concepts that are related to your keyword, but that do not necessarily contain your keyword.  Think of Advanced Match as the sales guy that’s going above and beyond to bring in great leads where you least expected them. 

Which keywords should you start with first?  Well, if you have a big budget and want to focus on driving traffic, then you may want more high-volume search terms (e.g. car) in your campaign. If your objective is getting higher conversions, you may want to include more tail terms as they are more product specific (e.g., new 2010 Toyota Prius hybrid car).  Make sure to use excluded words (or negative keywords) to avoid matching to terms that are not relevant to your product or service. 

2.  Monitor your campaign regularly
Because search habits constantly change, you should tune your campaigns as regularly as possible.  The frequency really depends on you and what your objectives are, and if you’re meeting those goals or not. 

The best way to determine your campaign’s performance is through the myriad of reports available through our reporting tools.  It’s kind of like when you check traffic in the evening to determine the best route to take home.  You may choose to take the shortest route but sit in a little bit of traffic (or a lot if you’re on highway 101).  Or you may choose a route that is longer but less traveled, and gets you home 15 minutes earlier.  The same logic applies to your campaign.  Know your objective, and look at the reports to help you get there.

Once you have some insight about which campaigns and keywords are performing, here are some things you can try:

• Work with your account manager to identify additional keywords and bid opportunities.
• Take advantage of our keyword suggestion tools & discovery tools to supplement your existing keywords.
• Use organic search results to optimize campaigns and expand your keywords or add excluded words to avoid future matches.

3.  Tune your campaign
By now you have a pretty good idea which keywords are doing well in your campaigns, and which ones are lagging.  It’s time to take action.  Separate lower performing keywords from higher performing keywords so your high performers aren’t dragged down by your low performers.  Create a “low budget” campaign that includes all of your low performing keywords, and use lower bids so that you continue to participate in the marketplace. 

Another tuning technique is to separate keywords that get a lot of clicks from low-volume keywords.  This allows you to tweak your ad copy for the greatest impact on the high-volume terms.  Mixing the two may dilute your campaigns overall performance, and make it difficult for you to determine which keyword is negatively affecting your campaign’s Quality Index.

 4.  Sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor…but don’t get too comfortable
Now that you’ve tuned your campaigns, give it some time to see how each campaign performs, but don’t let it simmer for too long.  The duration really depends on how much traffic you’re getting.  You may notice changes taking effect immediately, or you may have to wait a few days or weeks to see the full impact.    

At the end of the day, where does this cycle of keyword addition, monitoring, separating, tuning, re-running your campaign take you?  It allows you to improve your ad quality and your campaign performance.  The better a campaign’s performance, the less it’ll cost you to participate.  And who wouldn’t want a few extra dollars back in their pockets?

Besides, if you’re not managing your campaign regularly, you can bet your competitor is—and possibly taking traffic away from you.  To protect your traffic and your business, we encourage you to actively manage your campaign. Don’t just set and forget it!

—Payam Tehrani, product manager, Sponsored Search ad selection

 Author’s note: I welcome your feedback on this blog, and highly encourage you to share your experiences and offer your best practices in managing your Yahoo! Search Marketing campaign.

Navigating Your Way to Better Quality

Using the ADR and blocked domains to your advantage

Back in the day, family road trips were incomplete without maps. Actual, paper maps. The kind that were supposed to fold neatly into a rectangle when not in use, though in most cases, probably ended up crumpled on the floorboard or dash of the sedan.

Luckily for most of us, technology took over, and instead of relying on a state atlas or old-fashioned city grid, we can now print out door-to-door driving directions online, or even fancier, rely on a GPS device. And though some probably still prefer the thrilling adventure of just hitting the open pavement with no specific destination in mind, most of us like to know where we’re going, and the fastest, most logical way to get there.

This is the idea behind our recently launched Ad Delivery Report (ADR.) By navigating to this spot in the account interface and selecting a date range, you’ll get a list of all of domains in our network that are driving traffic to your account. If you’ve installed Full Analytics, you can also access domain-specific conversion data, which is another bonus.

The concept behind the ADR is really one of transparency. We believe that rather than sharing a high-level list of partners in our network—which may or may not be sending traffic to your account—it makes much more sense to provide you with the actual list of domains that are contributing to your clicks. This way, you’ve got a clear view of where your ads are served, something that will aid you in your quest for tailoring the traffic mix at the account level.

Meaning?
Well, by poring over the ADR—and either our Full Analytics conversion data or your own third-party conversion stats—you can make informed decisions about which domains do or don’t meet your performance thresholds. This, in turn, will factor into your decisions relating to domain blocking, which is a great way to improve the overall performance of your account.

Say, for example, that you’d like to eliminate referring domains that are contributing more than 100 clicks and are converting at less than 0.05%. By reviewing the ADR combined with your conversion information, you can isolate any domains that meet that criteria and then block those using our blocked domains functionality. This essentially removes those domains that aren’t performing to your standards, which ultimately will benefit your traffic quality mix.

And unlike the sometimes illogically persistent and oftentimes monotonous tone of the voice-enabled GPS, our ADR will simply show you the stats and let you navigate from there.

— Malin Kennedy, Senior Manager, Advertiser Experience

Dear Abby for Web Advertising

The top 7 how-to’s of 2009

Well, it’s not quite like “Dear Abby,” but last year’s how-to posts from the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog and the Yahoo! Advertising blog are the next best thing. In the last year of the “aughts,” we tried to help show you the way to more effective Sponsored Search, and more effective Web advertising in general, with a bevy of posts that answered your most pressing questions—everything from how to develop strong keywords to how to keep those keywords and descriptions from facing rejection, to how to use social networks like Twitter and Facebook to get your messages out.

Here’s just a sample of what we shared (for more, visit the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog archive):

1. Build your foundation with strong keywords
When it comes to keywords, one way to get more conversions is to get really nitty-gritty. Consider bidding on more specific keywords that contain things like the brands you sell and even specific model numbers. In other words, think like your customers.

2. Tidy up to improve account performance
You know how it is with your garage, your desk at work, your computer’s desktop and files—just about everything gets cluttered, and thus, difficult to manage. Here are five ways to increase your performance by tidying up your account structure, keywords, ad quality and so forth. What was true in 2009 is just as true today.

3. Improve your quality score
We know you probably weren’t an English major, but even if you were, writing search marketing ads probably wasn’t taught in that Victorian Lit class you so enjoyed and got an A+ in. It’s a tricky business, writing high quality search ads, what with a slew of products and services and just 40 characters with which to promote your business. Here are four ways to improve your ads for lower cost and higher placement.

4. Rejecting rejections
Ouch! Rejection hurts. But we in Internet advertising have our standards. At least with us, it’s not personal. In fact, there are at least five pretty simple ways you can can use to help your ads avoid rejection by our editors. Forewarned is forearmed, and a little knowledge up front will help get your ads through the gauntlet. If only Internet dating was this easy!

5. Start out on the right foot
Listen, no one is a search advertising expert, at least not right off the bat. But you want to start out on the right foot. Smart starters focus on three major areas: keyword selection, good copywriting (which includes your title keywords) and testing two or more ads against one another. Give it a shot.

6. Bidding with your brain
When bidding on keywords, it all comes down to arithmetic, to wit: profit, CPA, ROAS and ROI. Good ad writing isn’t all fun, games, and cute wordplay—it’s an admixture (sorry for the pun) of both. To paraphrase Chuckles the Clown it’s, “a little song, a little dance and little arithmetic down your pants.” Oh, you want the algebraic details? Look here.

7. Marketing with social networks
This one’s a freebie. Yahoo’s got relationships with social networks like Facebook and Twitter—hey, they’re on our new homepage—but we don’t own ’em. So if you want to promote your business through ’em, we’re all for it. In this post, author and entrepreneur Clara Shih offers three solid tips on how to do just that.

—Michael Mattis

(Image by awezmaz, CC, 2.0)

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