Posts filed under 'How To's'

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

More Holiday How-to’s

Join Us at Our Holiday Consumer Overview and Search Best Practices Web Conference

Our last holiday strategies webinar was so successful that we’ve added another. This free webinar, hosted by Pato Spagnoletto, our Senior Director of Marketing, will cover how users move between paid and algorithmic search, how to manage campaigns holistically in order to deliver superior performance, and offer tons of helpful tips and best practices for the holidays.

When: Wednesday, November 14, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time.
Where: Right from your computer.

To register, click here and follow the instructions.

—The Team

Customize It!

An Intro to Adding Custom Keyword Settings

Customizing your keyword settings has always been easy, but did you know you can set your customization values at the moment you add your keywords on the Choose Keywords page?

First, you’ll need to know which custom settings you can set for each keyword. By simply adding a specific text string in the Selected Keywords panel, you can customize any or all of the following:

• Custom bid—For Sponsored Search, you can specify a custom bid for the keyword. This custom bid will override any default bid set at the ad group level.
• Custom URL—You can enter the domain to be used as the destination URL for this keyword.
• Alternate text—If you’re using the Insert Keyword feature but your title or description have exceeded the limit, the alternate text you specify is inserted in the ad instead of the keyword.
• Advanced match type—You can enable or disable the Advanced match type for the keyword, a feature that can increase your traffic by displaying your ad in a broader range of Sponsored Search results.
  Enter your custom settings using the following format:

keyword**custom bid**custom URL**alternate text**advanced match-Y/N

An example might be:

widgets**1.80**http://widgets.com**blue widgets**Y

So, you would use the above example if your keyword is widgets, your custom bid is $1.80, your custom URL is http://widgets.com, your alternate text is blue widgets and you want to turn on the Advanced match type feature.

If you do not want to use all of the custom settings available in this format, you can simply include the asterisk separators without entering the values for the settings you wish to omit. For example, to omit the custom bid setting:

widgets****http://widgets.com**blue widgets**Y

You can get all the details by clicking on the question mark in the top-right corner of your account. Type “custom keywords” in the search box and click on “Adding Custom Keywords.”

—Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo! Search Marketing Writer

Questions and Answers on Blocked Domains

The announcement that our new Blocked Domains feature went live Monday, October 15 elicited quite a few comments and questions.

To reiterate: Your Sponsored Search and Content Match ads can be displayed outside of Yahoo.com and other areas of Yahoo! They can appear throughout our partner distribution network. The Blocked Domains feature lets you specify websites or sections of a website in our partner distribution network where you don’t want your ads to appear. At its core, Blocked Domains is a tool to help give you more control over your traffic from your paid search and content match ads.

To clarify: You can block up to 250 domains. This doesn’t mean that there are exactly 250 domains that you should block, or that there are just 250 domains in our partner distribution network. It means that you have the option to block up to 250 domains of your choice. At this time, however, you may not block IP addresses, Yahoo! domains, or opt out of the Yahoo! partner distribution network as a whole. Also, we do not make available a list of all Yahoo! distribution partners—there are simply too many, plus the list is ever-changing.

Blocked Domains goes hand-in-glove with the pricing discounts we announced in June. Before adding these pricing discounts, you were charged the same amount per click regardless of whether the traffic came from a Yahoo! page or a site in our distribution network. Pricing discounts enable you to be receive a discount for certain clicks, depending on our assessment of the quality of traffic from our partners’ sites. Typically, these discounts range from 5 to 15 percent.

Tips and Tools
Getting back to Blocked Domains, there are some sites, such as those of your competition, that you may want to block for obvious reasons. You may also want to keep your ads from appearing on sites that you know won’t appeal to your prospective customers, or on those with which you do not want your brand associated.

To determine which sites or pages may not be performing the way you want based on your business goals, you should review the data from your web server logs, account reports and other account data.

For more info on how to read your web server logs and on tracking URLs, visit this page in the Help Center.

In addition, you may also want to consider using a third-party analytics package to help you determine which URLs to block. There are many tools available. Larger firms may wish to consider hiring a third-party consultant to run analytics, determine any URLs to block, and so forth. Yahoo! Search Marketing offers an Ambassador Directory of firms that have proven proficiency in Yahoo! products and services.

—The Team

Can’t See Your Ad?

Quick Fix Tips

We get a number of calls each week from advertisers having trouble finding their newly created ads on Yahoo.com. More often than not, this can be chalked up to one minor issue or another. Here’s a list of some of the most common issues and how to fix them:

1. Your billing info may be incorrect
If you’ve just signed up with us, it’s possible that your ads are not showing because you haven’t given us all your billing information, or your billing information is incorrect. We won’t activate your account until we’ve got all the correct deets. It’s a good idea to go back and double check.

2. There may be editorial issues
Your ad may be in the queue awaiting review, or it may have editorial issues. Your ads, like everyone’s, need to comply with our editorial guidelines. To check your ad’s editorial status, log in to your account, go to the Campaigns tab and click “Editorial Status.” There, you’ll be able to see any pending issues.

3. Your ad may not be on the first page
Your ad’s ranking may not high enough for it to be displayed on the first page of search results. But it may appear on a subsequent search results page. Click the “Next” link at the bottom of the search results page and check to see if your ad appears on subsequent pages.

If you want your ad to be displayed higher in Sponsored Search results, work to improve your ad’s quality, increase your bid, or do a little of both. You can monitor your ads’ performance on the Ad Group Details page. To find out more about ad quality and how to improve it, see our previous posts, here and here, and consult the Help Center.

4. You may have reached your campaign Daily Spending Limit
When you set up a campaign, you set a Daily Spending Limit for it. If your Daily Spending Limit is too low, it may slow or stop your ads from being displayed for that day. In this case, consider changing your daily spending limit to meet the recommended amount.

To view your campaign Daily Spending Limit, go to the specific campaign under the Campaigns tab. Your Daily Spending Limit appears in the “Campaign Performance” box. To view the recommended Daily Spending Limit, click the “Change” button and hit “Display Estimates.” The page will refresh and the recommended Daily Spending Limit estimate will appear in the “Set Campaign and Schedule” box. You can change your limit from there.

Note that you can change your Daily Spending Limit at any time: You can increase it during times that you think may garner the most traffic, and decrease it at times when you think you might have less traffic.

For more on these and other ad display issues, take a look at our FAQs. And don’t hesitate to call our Customer Solutions team at: (866) YAHOO-SM (866-924-6676) if you encounter any persistent issues.

—Michael Mattis

Holiday Search Marketing Strategies

Getting Your Customers to Shop ‘Til They Drop (a Lot of Money on Your Site)

The holidays can be the make or break season for retailers, whether online, offline or a little of both. For obvious and quite unsentimental reasons, we prefer our advertisers to be on the “make” end of the scale.

And, naturally, we do a lot of research around here based on the huge volumes of data our search business generates. In the interest of helping you “put the make” on the holiday season, we’re offering up some of our findings, as well as a few pointers to help enhance your holiday marketing plans.

Holiday Highlights
If you were to ask the Magic Eight Ball if 2007 is likely to be a good year for online retail, the answer might well be: “All signs point to yes.” According to comScore, online consumer spending grew 26 percent in 2006 to $24.4 billion. More than 80 percent of consumers did at least some shopping online (BizRate and Shop.org Holiday Mood Study 2006), and 50 percent of shoppers bought more stuff online in 2006 than 2005 (NielsenNetRatings research). It’s a pretty telling trend. (For what it’s worth, last year I did all of my holiday shopping online for the first time.)

The Yahoo! Search Marketing team has prepared some tips for advertisers based on the holiday data we gathered:

Engage the bargain hunters—According to the BizRate and Shop.org Holiday Mood Study 2006, nearly half of the consumers polled named “free shipping” as a primary motivator to purchase. Other shoppers named “online only sales” and “repeat buyer discounts.”

Keywords count—According to our internal data, “Christmas” was, not surprisingly, the most holiday-related search term in 2006 with more than three million average monthly searches. Other popular terms included “Christmas decoration,” “Hanukkah,” “holiday gift” and “gift for dad.” Make sure that your keyword selection includes holiday-related keywords and seasonal products and promotions.

Titillate with titles—Titles and descriptions can drive relevance and clicks, so it’s a best practice when creating specific holiday ad groups to place the holiday term prominently in both the title and the description, and include any special seasonal promotions in the copy.

Clear for landing—Make sure that your landing pages are relevant to your keywords, ad copy and any promotions. Nothing’s more frustrating for a consumer to click on an ad that says, “Get 10% off” something and then land on a page where that information is either absent or buried. Prices and promotions should be consistent with ad copy.

Combine search with display and offline advertising—Regular readers of our blog know that search is just one important part of your marketing mix. Make sure you include your keywords and consistent copy in your display and offline marketing material. If you haven’t already read them, check out two recent posts, one on combining search and display advertising and the other on integrating your online and offline campaigns.

We’ll go into some of these in more detail in future posts.

—Michael Mattis, Holiday Shopper

Photo courtesy Steve L., via Flickr.

Turn up Your Offline

Maximizing Offline Channels to Drive Search Success

Week before last, Didit VP Gerry Bavaro offered tips on how to pique people’s curiosity and direct it for more influential marketing. This week Robert Murray, President of the search marketing firm iProspect, picks up where Gerry left off and talks about the importance of off-line marketing to your search marketing efforts, and how to get the most out of your integrated campaigns.

Have you ever driven behind a truck whose rear door sported signage about a service that you needed? Or come across a sparsely written teaser ad about a product that intrigued you while flipping through the pages of a magazine? Or half-listened to a TV or radio ad about an upcoming local event that only grabbed your attention for a few brief seconds?

At some point during the last six months, chances are exposure to an offline ad has led you to go online and launch a search. That’s according to the findings of new research conducted by JupiterResearch and sponsored by my company, iProspect. 

The iProspect Offline Channel Influence on Search Behavior Study found that over the previous six months prior to June, 2006, 67 percent of Internet search users have been influenced to perform a search for a company, product, service, slogan or other related keywords as a result of exposure to some offline channel. The channels the study examined were television ads, radio ads, word-of-mouth, print ads, billboards/venue ads, and ads on trucks, taxis, buses and trains. Despite the obvious connection between offline advertising and search marketing effectiveness, many offline marketers don’t exactly make it easy for consumers to find them online. As a result, companies are leaving untold revenue on the table.

Trust Your Search Marketing Team—And Your Data
Your search marketing team often has the data and the ability to quickly test your advertising. This ability provides them with key insights into how consumers identify with your brand, messaging, and offers through keywords.

For example, imagine a marketer of gardening products contemplating a quarterly print or direct mail campaign. Search marketers could inform their offline counterparts what the most frequently searched for products are online each quarter, as well as the specific creative used in their paid search ads that generated the most clicks and the most conversions for each product. This information would not only help determine what products to promote via these other channels, but would also influence the words used to describe these products so they matched the language consumers associated with them most frequently.

Make it Easy to Find Your Brand
With that in mind, offline channels need to start making it easier for consumers to perform a search and find their brands in search results. This means working with search marketers to ensure that their websites are optimized around the terms that appear in their offline channels. It means including phrases like “Search ‘Mayfair Appliances’ on Yahoo!” or “find us on the Internet by searching ‘Boston Maid Services’.” In addition, offline marketers should start including the company URL just as frequently and prominently in their advertising as their 800 number or the physical address of the business.

Be Consistent with Look, Feel, Offers and Messaging
Offline channel marketers would be wise to take their cues from their search marketing team. For example, would it prove valuable to assess what keywords are driving the most traffic and conversions to the website? Are you bidding on your slogan or tagline?

This information can serve as a guide. Pick the most effective and already proven phrase that can be included in your offline advertising. This can help prospects to perform a search that can result in your website being returned prominently in the search results. If you’re not sure what the key phrase is, test.

Consistency of look and feel is also important. If a prospect reads your slogan or product name on the side of an orange and blue truck in bold black type, they should be greeted by a website that contains the same colors, and includes your slogan or product name in bold black type. This reassures them they have reached the right place.

It’s also critical that offers and messaging be consistent. For example, if your offline offer includes a free download or demo, or a 30 percent off discount, then make sure that searchers see this offer when they arrive on your website or landing page.

The language used in your advertising should be the same that prospects read when they get to the website. If you refer to something as a “service” offline, don’t call it a “product” or a “solution” on the website. If you call something “big-screen” online, don’t call it “wide-screen” offline, and so forth.

As the data from the study demonstrates, offline channels are definitely driving people to search, and ultimately, to purchase. Smart marketers will capitalize upon that trend and work to maximize the effectiveness of all of their channels to turn prospects into customers. The key to doing so is communication between offline and search marketers, making it easy for offline prospects to find your website via search engines, and having consistency in terms of look, feel and messaging.

—Robert Murray, President, iProspect

Fall Back on Travel

An Intro to Travel Submit

Autumn is just about upon us, and it’s the perfect time to jet off to some distant destination to see one of the most vivid joys of the season—colorful fall foliage. If you’re thinking about taking a tiptoe through the leaves, then you may want to traipse on over to Yahoo! Travel for more information on the best locales.

Better yet, if you’re a travel agent and need to advertise a trip deal for any time of year, you’re a great candidate for Yahoo! Travel Submit, a useful solution for anyone with travel-related offers to publicize. So even if you don’t represent a huge airline or hotel, you may still get value from Travel Submit if you have offers related to any of the following categories:

• Air travel
• Car Rental
• Cruises
• Destinations – Attractions/Activities
• Destinations – Events
• Lodging
• Rail, Ground Transport and Ferry
• Vacation Packages
• Vacation Rentals

As with Sponsored Search, you’re only charged when your ad is clicked. Your offers can be displayed in the Yahoo! Travel Deals section, as well as within the Yahoo! Travel Guide sections on Yahoo! Travel. There are a few requirements. Amongst them, you must:

• Have a valid travel offer to publicize, which must also comply with all applicable laws and regulations.
• Sign up for a Yahoo! ID, which you will use to manage your Travel Submit account. There is no charge for a Yahoo! ID, and you can create one when you sign up for your account.
• Agree to the Travel Submit Terms of Service.

As for you “leaf peepers,” some of the prime leaf-changing destinations are only available for a few weeks during the season, so you may want to make your plans right away!

—Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo! Search Marketing Writer

Retail Therapy

An Intro to Product Submit

If you have products to sell and they are not listed when buyers search online to do their shopping you may be missing out on the ever-growing number of consumers who are more likely to open a browser window than go window shopping.

To assist you in your online retail efforts, there is Yahoo! Product Submit. With Product Submit, your product listings appear in search results whenever someone searches for keywords related to your product. A product submission in Yahoo! Product Search is a simple way to give searchers a better lease on online shopping with a heaping dose of your stuff.

Benefits of Yahoo! Product Submit
Some benefits of using Yahoo! Product Submit include:

• Having your products display in Yahoo! Shopping’s Product Search Results
• Paying for product display only when your product listing is clicked, with the price-per-click determined by your product’s category
• The possibility of your product appearing in Yahoo! Shopping’s buyer’s guide pages to assist shoppers in making purchase decisions

Requirements for Yahoo! Product Submit
There are some requirements to participate in Yahoo! Product Submit. Amongst them, you must:

• Sell fixed-price products online and be authorized to sell and ship fixed-price products in the US
• Agree to the Product Submit Terms of Service
• Provide product descriptions in English and pricing in U.S. dollars

For more info, visit the Yahoo! Product Submit information page.

–Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo! Search Marketing Writer

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