Posts filed under 'How To's'

Convert Your Clicks

Ten landing page tips to turn visitors into customers

There’s something about a ten-item list that makes us want to get all Hestonian on you and break out the archaic pronouns, especially when it comes to something like getting people who visit your site to actually buy from you. After all, you work hard to get clicks. What could be more important than turning those clicks into customers?

But we’re kind of a live-and-let-live bunch here, and we’re not so big on telling people what they have to do. So consider these a set of suggestions about how to help optimize your landing pages. That way, when people get to your site, they’ll be more likely to make a purchase.

1. Tell them why they should buy from you
According to Marketing Experiments Journal, “Clarity of your value proposition is the most important factor in determining whether a customer buys from you or not.” To evaluate your value proposition, ask yourself the question: “Why should I buy from this site?”

2. Keep ‘em with you
There’s no way you’re going to get a potential customer to the intended destination—the “sale completion” page—if the path to get there is overgrown with weeds or rife with dead ends. This is what Marketing Experiments Journal calls “site flow disruption”; the way to combat it is to express your value proposition throughout the shopping process in a consistent and compelling way.

3. Don’t try to say too much
Don’t clutter your landing page with unnecessary details. Instead:
• Clearly state your key message using as few words as possible
• Use summary descriptions, sub-headings, bulleted lists and short paragraphs
• Adopt a standard one-column format for easy reading.

4. Make it simple
Improve the user experience with a site that is easy to navigate. A simple page layout that employs a clean visual and straightforward design is best. Here’s how:
• Design your site with a clear hierarchy with color and contrast for easily legible text
• Use meaningful and high-quality graphics (don’t clutter with too many)
• Use breadcrumbs to let visitors know where they are on your site
• Employ a clickable logo that takes the visitor to your homepage
• Use color to distinguish between visited and unvisited links.

Just as important, make sure you don’t:
• Employ horizontal scrolling
• Direct links to new browser windows
• Have flash-based content unless required.

5. Call them to action
Focus on one primary action per screen (don’t stuff too many products onto one screen). Make the call-to-action button clearly visible without having to scroll; don’t bury it under pages of information. Consider using tabs or a pop-up box to consolidate information.

6. Get specific
Provide product details and a large product image while displaying incentives—such as free shipping and warranty information—high on the page and close to the product. Don’t discourage visitors by requiring registration to your site.

7. Flaunt what you’ve got
What differentiates you from your competitors? Free shipping (both ways?), discounts, a 365-day warranty, price protection, privacy, customer service, etc.? If you’ve got it, flaunt it!

8. Search yourself
Make your site easy to navigate by helping potential customers find what they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible. A search feature box should be simple and visible with a type-in field, not a link. To help increase conversions, make sure your search results link to product pages.

9. Rally the believers
Credibility is a true testament: people don’t buy from websites, people buy from people. Thus, testimonials from devout customers—or even a letter from the CEO/Editor—persuades the unbelieving.

10. Let them make the choice
“Why should I buy this specific product?” Almost every e-tailer forgets about this, but it’s the question that’s key to Mr. or Ms. Customer’s mind. Prove to him or her why they should buy this over the competitive product by offering reviews, ratings and comparisons.

– Amy Borowicz

Three Questions to Ask About Your Clicks

What to do when you get an unexpected traffic surge

There you are, reviewing your account from last week, when you notice a jump in your clicks. Before you call us to find out what’s going on with your account, keep in mind that unexpected traffic is not necessarily a cause for alarm. Consider the following three questions:

First: Have you changed anything in your account recently? 

A broad question, to be sure, but try to recall: Have you added keywords or changed your bids? Either of these actions can affect your traffic.

Second: Are you noticing abnormal click activity, or just traffic that’s not converting? 

Examine your account and your web logs. Are your ads appearing on sites that are not meeting your business needs? If so, we offer tools to help you control your traffic. Find out more about Blocked Domains, Geo-targeting and Continent Blocking in your Search Marketing Help Section, and get to know your traffic by visiting the Traffic Quality Center.

Third: Have you set a daily spending limit?

Your traffic may fluctuate from day to day. But by setting a Daily Spending Limit, you help control the amount you spend. For example, if you average $250 in clicks per day and set your Daily Spending Limit at $350, you can capitalize on the extra clicks that result from a spike, without breaking the bank.

Submitting a Click Review Request

If you feel you have explored everything above and still have questions, or would like us to investigate your traffic further, our Traffic Quality Center provides simple instructions for submitting a Click Review Request.

After you submit the request, we will perform a series of diagnostic tests and analyses to attempt to identify potential issues that may have affected your traffic. We take all inquiries seriously, and though the length of investigations may vary, we work to achieve a resolution within 10 business days of your request.

Remember, keep an eye on your account, monitor your traffic regularly, and if you do spot something suspicious, let us know—we’re happy to help.

— Kastle Waserman, Communications Manager, Customer Solutions

A Smarter Start

Free Booklet Offers Search Marketing How-to’s

We’ve always had oodles of helpful content to assist you in making your campaigns as effective as possible. There’s the Help Center, the contextual help right in your administration interface, webinars and, of course, there’s the blog.

But now we’ve got oodles more, all in one place, with the publication of the Smart Start Guide. It’s a guidebook geared especially toward the beginning search marketer, but it also offers tips for the more advanced Yahoo! Search Marketing advertiser.

Yahoo! Search Marketing Specialist “Sharon Goodsense” shows how the decisions you make with your account play a key role in your search marketing success. In this easy-to-read booklet, Sharon takes you through the steps of creating effective campaigns and offers helpful advice of how to make good decisions. The Smart Start Guide includes chapters on:

• Getting to know your account
• Building a foundation with strong keywords
• Organizing ad groups for success
• Writing effective ads
• Making sure your ads are high quality
• Matching keywords to your customers’ searches
•  Determining effective bids
• Targeting your ads geographically
• Advertising on content sites other than Yahoo.com
• Tracking your results

There’s also a section of effective troubleshooting techniques. You can download the Smart Start Guide.

—The Team 

What Quality Index is… Not

We talk a lot about quality index, but what does it mean to you?

When defining a thing, sometimes it helps to start with what the thing is not. So here’s what your quality index is NOT:

• A measure of your conversions. (A “conversion” is when a click becomes a sale, or when the user takes some other desired action, such as registering.)
• A measure of the quality of the products and services you offer through your site.
• A measure of how nice your site looks, how pretty its graphics are, or how well it is laid out.

Here’s what an ad’s quality index IS:

It is a relative measure of how relevant an ad is. It reflects an ad’s ability to meet the needs of users by taking into account various relevance factors and click-through rate compared to its position and other ads displayed at the same time. It also takes into account all keywords in your ad group. 

Why You Should Care
Improving your ad’s quality index can help you achieve better ad placement at less cost. On the blog, we have tried to offer some pretty comprehensive tips to help you do that:

• Improving Ad Quality, Part I
• Improving Ad Quality, Part II
• Improving Ad Quality, Part III
• Improving Ad Quality, Part IV
• Improving Ad Copy
• Understanding and Improving Your Quality Index

For more on the quality index, visit the Help Center.

—Michael Mattis, Quality Blogster

Going Social

Four Rules for Winning in Social Media

Editor’s Note: I heard Larry Bailin, author of Mommy, Where Do Customers Come From? speak on “Using social media to drive traffic to your blog” at BlogWorld Expo in Vegas a few weeks ago. I was impressed and asked him to pen a piece about how online advertisers can help build relationships with their customers and supplement their Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns using social media—not just blogs, but sites and tools like MyBlogLog, Flickr, del.icio.us, MySpace, Facebook and so forth. He outdid himself, and came up with four immutable rules of relationship-building that apply even beyond media.

Being from New Jersey, it’s hard for me to associate the term “traffic” with anything positive. In fact, the word “traffic” sends the wrong message and is counterproductive to the thought process needed to succeed in social media.

If you are to truly succeed in the competitive social media landscape, you need to remove “driving traffic” from the top of your goals list and replace it with “driving customers.” In short, you need to stop measuring visits, and start measuring victories.

Offline business rules have always applied in the online space. It would be a safe bet that the social rules we all grew up with—the ones our loving parents (hopefully) drilled into our heads—would also apply when used in online social situations.

Social Rule No. 1: Choose Your Friends Wisely
It seems that building a large number of friends is the goal for most online socialites. The more friends you have the more popular you are. In an offline situation, a good example of this is high school. The less popular, nerdy types only had a few friends who happened to be other less-popular nerdy types with similar goals and interests.

By grouping together, sharing ideas and staying hyper-focused, this social solidarity seemed to always achieve levels of success later in life that most of us could only dream of (Bill Gates, for example).

The Take-Away: No, the first rule of social media is not “Don’t talk about social media.” Quite the opposite, in fact. But you will want to be picky about who you talk to and what to talk about. A smaller group of like-minded individuals allows you to spread your message through a more targeted audience. Large groups of broad targets and views will muddy the waters and stop you from achieving the results needed to succeed.

Social Rule No. 2: Remember the Golden Rule
“You get what you give” is a rule that has stood the test of time. You cannot expect people to do for you unless you do for them. If you are to make a mark on the social scene, you first have to do for others. You need to participate, comment, visit and support others if you expect them to do the same in return.

The Take-Away: By participating, you become part of the community. People start to recognize you and appreciate your efforts. These efforts will not go unrewarded. I started my blog [ConnectedCustomers.net] eight months ago. I spent the first six months visiting other blogs in the marketing category and commenting on them. I added some to my blog-roll and even sent personal messages to a few that I really liked. The result was that others responded in kind. Within eight months I developed a following of more than 15,000 readers.

Social Rule No. 3: If You Have Nothing Nice to Say, Don’t Say Anything at All.
This one is simple. Bashing and negativity runs rampant through the social scene. I’m not talking about negative comments—if you don’t agree with something, you should post your opinion.

Bashing someone is something totally different. If you are nasty or tend to post inappropriate negative comments all the time, it won’t be long before a community labels you a jackass and no one will take you seriously. Obviously, this is counter productive to your goals.

The Take-Away: Take the time to think through your comments and actions. Try to give constructive criticism as opposed to a negative view. Choose your words wisely, and it will showcase your expertise as opposed to your dark side.

Social Rule No. 4: If You Keep Doing that, You’ll Go Blind.
Whether it is a website, blog or MySpace page, put your users’ interests first. Lots of renegade code, widgets and advertisements will not only slow down your site, but may even crash a browser or two. Take the time to think about how every element will be seen and reacted to by your potential customer (which is what a visitor is). Will it have a positive or negative impact, and does it enhance or detract from your message?

The Take-Away: Take the visitor experience very seriously, because this is where the rubber meets the road. Make things that you want viewed easy to access. When a site is cumbersome to use, people will stop using it and they will become blind to your existence.

Wrap-Up
Following these rules can help you achieve higher levels of success and create your own personal set of rules to socialize by. But remember: Social media is a two-way street, and the oncoming traffic can either help you or kill you. The choice is yours.

—Larry Bailin, CEO, Single Throw and author of Mommy, Where Do Customers Come From?

The Whys and Hows of “Insert Keyword”

Using This Feature for Better Relevance

The Insert Keyword feature, available when you create a new ad or edit an existing one, is useful for speeding the ad creation and editing process. But did you know it can also help increase your ads’ quality?

Here’s how. You’ll notice that when you create or edit an ad, you are shown the prompt “+ Insert Keyword Automatically” when you click into either the Title or Description(s) dialogue boxes:

Click “+ Insert Keyword Automatically” and you get a prompt like this:

In the dialogue box, enter your “default text.” Your default text should be something that can serve as an overall description for all of your keywords in case the actual search term exceeds character limits. For example, if you’re in the wine business, your default text might be, simply, “Wine.”

“{KEYWORD:Wine}” would then appear in the dialogue box.

You then wrap the rest of your title copy around “{KEYWORD:Wine}.” For instance, you might write, “Buy Premium{KEYWORD:Wine}.”

But here’s the snazzy part: Your ad’s title won’t necessarily appear as “Buy Premium Wine.” Rather, once a searcher has entered one of your keywords—”Chardonnay,” for example—the turbines of our mighty engines kick-in and, in an instant, your ad title appears as “Buy Premium Chardonnay.”

That’s probably a lot more clickable to someone shopping for Chardonnay than the generic “Wine,” right? Again, the default text will appear only if our engines determine that using the search term would exceed our character limits.

The same goes for your short and long descriptions, though we’ve noticed that placing the keyword in the title is even better than placing it in the description.

Take advantage of the Insert Keyword feature, as well as other features like ad testing and geo-targeting, to help make your ads as relevant as they can be.

To learn more about the Insert Keyword Feature, click here. To learn more about how using multiple features can help improve your results, click here. 

—Michael Mattis

Understanding Bids and Budgets

Going Once, Going Twice… Sold!

A downside of the online auction trend is that the charming auctioneer’s chant has become an endangered species. We may lament the loss of the auctioneer’s sing-song, but one thing remains constant to most auctions—the use of bids to reflect value.

When you set bids for ad groups and keywords in your search marketing account, you are essentially expressing your valuation of the amount you are willing to pay for clicks on your associated ads. But how can you know if the bids you’re placing on keywords—and the spending limits you’re setting for your account and campaigns—are enough to get the results you’re seeking?

Here are a few considerations to assist you as you decide whether or not to increase your bids or spending limits:

Setting Bids and Spending Limits
Before you can increase your bid, you have to set a bid. These bids should be aligned with your account daily spending limit and/or your campaign daily spending limit. And your spending limits should match your business goals.

Similarly, your bids should be based on your business economics and objectives. Bidding too high may find you paying more than the value of the click to your business. Bidding too low may not allow your ad to be displayed in your preferred position in search results.

Adjust Your Bid
You can use historical forecasting to help determine whether or not increasing your bid may help you attain a higher average position, more impressions or additional clicks. Reporting metrics and analytics data can also help you decide whether to increase or decrease ad group and keyword bids based on how they drive conversions.

Increasing bids for specific keywords in your ad group may also help you to get the best value from your highest-volume keywords. For example, you might set an ad group bid that would be applied to the lower-volume keywords, then set custom bids for the higher-volume keywords only. This would be faster than trying to set individual bids for each keyword. Remember, your cost-per-click and position in search results is based on a combination of your ad quality and bid, not just your bid alone.

Adjust Your Daily Spending Limit
Generally, ads are displayed until your account or campaign daily spending limit is reached. To ensure that your ads do not go offline after you’ve adjusted or increased your bid, you may need to adjust or increase your daily spending limits.

Alternatively, there are several ways in which you can improve your overall account and campaign performance, which should help you use your budget most efficiently. These include:

• Structure your campaigns and ad groups so that like items are grouped together.
• Fine-tune your keywords by using the available keyword matching options, such as advanced match and alternative text, as well as the insert keyword feature.
• If your account offers campaign optimization, use this feature to automatically optimize your bids and budget based on your business objectives.

And the next time you are at a live auction, try not to be confused by the auctioneer’s speedy cadence. You only have to be concerned with the two numbers amid all of the “filler” words—the current bid and the asking bid.

—Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo! Search Marketing

What’s a DMA®?

Using Geo-Targeting to Get Map-Minded

I’ve always had a thing for maps, so naturally geo-targeting is one of my favorite Yahoo! Search Marketing features. As you may know, when you create a campaign, your have the option to target a “Specific Region” or go with the “Entire Market.” When you choose to target a Specific Region, you are prompted to choose either “State/Province/Territory” or “DMA® or City and Surrounding Area.”

At the bottom of the page, you’ll see a footnote explaining that “DMA® is a registered service mark of Nielsen Media Research, Inc… ” So what’s a DMA? “DMA” stands for “Designated Marketing Area.” The term was originally used to describe a region where a population could receive the same or similar information via radio and TV. It has become an advertising industry standard, and can now apply to targeted Internet and newspaper content as well. A DMA is usually associated with a metropolitan area.

But a DMA can contain multiple cities. And, depending on the region, a DMA can be quite a large area. The Los Angeles DMA, for example, is quite large. The Erie, Pennsylvania DMA, by contrast, serves just a small area in the Northwest corner of the Quaker State.

Geo-Targeting Tips
You should consider using geo-targeting if you:

• Offer services in a specific area only
• Have a local store
• Have a chain of stores over a wide area (say, several states) and want to drive customers to different branches
• If you are legally restricted to advertise in some areas.  

For small- and medium-sized businesses that cater to a highly localized customer base—flower delivery or singing telegrams, for example—DMAs can sometimes be too large. If that’s the case, here are two tips to help you target your customers more precisely.

First, be sure to mention your precise location in your geo-targeted ad title and/or description copy. This will help your customers know that they are reading a relevant ad and make it very clear what area you service to help ensure you get more relevant clicks.

In addition to geo-targeting by DMA, you may also want to consider setting up a second campaign that’s not geo-targeted. This second campaign should use keywords that are specific to your location. For example, “Burbank locksmith” rather than just “locksmith.” This can help ensure that you’ve got all your bases covered.

For more info, visit the Help Center. You may also want to look into Yahoo! Local Listings, which is another cost-effective way to reach customers in your area through Yahoo! Local. 

—Michael Mattis, Amateur Cartographer  

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

Your Quality Index

A Quick Guide to Understanding and Improving It

You’ve seen the graphic display of your ads’ quality index in your secure account interface. It’s that little blue bar on each ad detail page that resembles the lighted bars you might find blinking on your stereo.

When all five sections of the bar are colored in blue, your quality index score is high. When three sections are filled in, your score is OK. When only one is filled in…well, you get the idea.

But what is this quality index thing, why does it matter, and how can you make it better?

It’s All Relative (and Relevant)
In a nutshell, an ad’s quality index is a relative measure of how relevant it is to users. In determining your quality index, our system takes into account your ad’s click-through rate compared to its average position in search results, as well as to that of other ads displayed at the same time, other keywords in your ad group, and other relevance factors.

Why Should I Care?
You should care because ads with a higher quality index can receive higher ranking in Sponsored Search results. Our system calculates an ad’s ranking based on your bid, your ad’s quality and other relevance factors. A high-quality ad may be ranked higher than a poor-quality ad, even if the poor-quality ad’s bid is higher.

Please note the graphic above is provided for illustrative purposes only

OK, so how do I Improve My Quality Index?
Your ad’s quality index reflects its ability to meet the needs and desires of users—that is, how well it helps them find what they want, quickly and accurately. If your ads don’t meet the needs of users, users are less likely to click them. Fewer clicks means fewer customers and conversions.

When this happens, nobody wins: not you, not us and not the user. High-quality ads, by contrast, can help create winners out of all of us. The quality index was set up to encourage advertisers to better meet the needs of users—who are, after all, the reason we are both here.

Here are a number of tactics you can use to improve the quality of your ads, and thus, your quality index:

Use relevant keywords—Make sure the keywords in your ad group are highly relevant to the ads in the same ad group.

Include your keyword in your creative—Using the keyword itself in titles and descriptions of your ad. You can use the Insert Keyword feature to help you do this automatically.

Take advantage of excluded keywords—Use this feature to block certain searches that you think may not be relevant. This can help keep your budget focused on more likely prospects. For example, if you sell portable radios but not ham radio equipment, you can block searches that include the word “ham.”

Use ad testing—You may have noticed that when you create an ad in an Ad Group, you are prompted to create another one. You should do this in all of your ad groups, because when you create more than one ad, our system will test the ads automatically. Ads that perform better then begin to appear more frequently in search results, and you can edit or delete ads that perform poorly. Try different copy, different offers or different display URLs to help determine what works best.

Gather intelligence—Almost all’s fair in love and advertising, so you shouldn’t feel shy about spying on your competitors. And by spying, we mean searching for their products or services so you can look at their ads—not breaking into their offices, tapping their phones or any of that illicit Watergate stuff, OK? Take a look at your competitors’ ads to determine if your offers are as strong as theirs.

Offer specials—Consider including special offers in your ad copy. Take a look at a calendar: It’s chock-full of holidays that you should consider taking advantage of. Limited-time offers, free shipping, two-for-ones, free gifts, contests and so forth can be very effective. Remember, it’s not just about your ad, it’s also about the value that users think you can deliver.

Resources

Bidding and Ranking Tutorial

Ranking Model Overview

Improving Ad Quality Blog Post Series

—Michael Mattis

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