Posts filed under 'How To's'

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

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

The More the Merrier

Using More Features Can Help Make Your Campaigns More Successful

We’re always studying how advertisers are using Yahoo! Search Marketing tools and features, getting feedback and adjusting to current demands. Our ongoing roll-out of new features is a big part of this effort.

In our research we noticed a few interesting trends:

• A significant percentage of advertisers may have been reluctant to use some existing features and to try new ones
• Some advertisers may not have been aware if they were using certain features or not
• Most importantly: Advertiser who took advantage of certain features were generally better satisfied with their performance than advertisers did not use those features

Take for example, ad testing, sometimes called A/B testing. Ad testing allows you to test different versions of your ad to see which one receives the highest click-through rate and can help you improve your quality index score. However, we found that some advertisers may not have known whether they were using ad testing or not. That’s probably because ad testing occurs automatically but only if you have more than one ad in each ad group.

If you don’t have more than one ad in an ad group, there’s nothing to test against. To take advantage of ad testing, you have to have at least two ads in each ad group, and preferably more (up to 20).

You can see which ads are performing best by clicking on the Campaigns tab and going into a specific ad group. There you can compare the ads in that ad group and see which ones are performing best.

But you can save yourself the trouble of manually checking on your ads all the time by making sure ad optimization is turned on. With Ad optimization those ads in ad group that have a higher click-through rate (CTR) may be displayed more often than those with a lower CTR. To find out how to turn on ad optimization, consult the Help Center.

Here are some helpful hints on ad testing. There’s also some useful info in the help section, and a “How Ad Testing Works” tutorial.

Then there’s geo-targeting. While this is a very in-demand feature, we found that fewer of you were using it than should be. Geo-targeting lets you restrict your ads to users who are either located in, or who are interested in, a specific geographic area. You select that geographic region for each campaign. Once selected, that targeting is applied to all of the ad groups and the ads within that campaign. For more on geo-targeting check out our previous posts, here and here, as well as our “how geo-targeting works” tutorial.

Lastly (but certainly not least-ly) there’s your quality index score. You’ve probably seen the little “five bars” graphic in your secure account interface. This isn’t a feature that you can turn off and turn on, like geo-targeting, but one that’s always on and indicating your ad quality relative to competing ads in the network. Basically, your quality index score (to quote our FAQs):

…reflects your ad’s ability to meet the needs of users by looking at how relevant your ad is to each keyword and also its click-through rate relative to its position and other ads displayed at the same time.   

And:

Your ad’s quality index also impacts how much you need to bid and the position in which your ad appears—in some instances, ads with a higher quality index may require a lower bid and/or receive better placement on the results page

In short, maintaining a high quality index score can help you achieve better placement and cost savings. Some advertisers, however, may still be in a bit of a quandary over what constitutes a quality ad. But help is on the way. Here are number of resources:

For basics, there’s our Bidding and Ranking tutorial

For tips on improving ad quality:

Improving Ad Quality, Part I: The Equalizer

Improving Ad Quality, Part II: Finding the right message for your customers with Ad Testing

Improving Ad Quality, Part III: Using the Insert Keyword feature

Improving Ad Quality, Part IV: Structure Matters

Think Short

—Michael Mattis

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Note also the permanent link in the right-hand column. And you can still get posts in an RSS feed.

 —Michael Mattis, Head Telegraphy & Semaphore Specialist

And You Can Take That to the Bank

How to Add Credit Cards to Your Account

The first charge card was created as a convenience to travelers, allowing them to pay for dining, entertainment and airline expenses without having to carry cash. But recent surveys have suggested that purchasers spend more than twice as much on the average credit card transaction as compared to using cash. Who knew a wallet-sized rectangular piece of plastic with a mere .76mm thickness could be so devious?

Such knowledge may well have you seeking a card with a better rate and better rewards. And when the mailman comes a-knockin’ with your new synthetic gold, you can use the following steps to add it as a payment option for your Yahoo! Search Marketing account:

Add a New Credit Card to Your Account

• From the Administration tab, click the “Accounts” subtab. 
• Click the blue “Edit” link in the Payment Method field (next to the payment method currently used to fund your search marketing account) in the Billing and Payment Information section.
• Click the blue ”+Add a Credit Card” link found in the heading box of the bottom section to the right of the title View All Fields.
• Enter your credit card information on the Enter a Payment Method page.
  Click “Save Changes.”

If you would like to delete an existing credit card from your account, please call us at (866) YAHOO-SM (866-924-6676), and a Customer Solutions advocate can assist you in removing the credit card account information.

—Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo! Search Marketing Writer

Improve Your Conversion Rates

9 Tips to Help Optimize Your Landing Pages

For obvious reasons we tend to focus a lot on keywords and ad copy. They’re vital to getting search users to click on your ads. But once they have clicked, then what? Hopefully, they’re A) in a buyin’ mood and B) they’ve actually come to the right place.

You can help promote both of these results by optimizing your landing pages. Here are nine tips to help get your leads to stick around and buy from you:

1. Connect the search experience to the landing page experience.
Wherever possible, use the same language on your landing pages as you do in your ads. It’s a real disconnect when you click on an ad that reads, “Online Conversion Rate Counter” only to land on a page selling a “Conversion Calculating Service.”

2. Integrate your landing page into your site.
Some advertisers make the mistake of building stand-alone landing pages for certain keywords that are more-or-less “divorced” from the rest of their sites. This can make your business seem sketchy to potential customers, who you want to be able to trust you with their credit card info. A consistent experience across all of your pages and product offerings can help create a more convincing experience. (More on this below.)

3. Gain their trust.
Use trusted, third-party security providers and make sure their badges and icons are clearly visible.

4. Offer tips and suggestions.
How can potential customers best use the product? If you’re selling steaks, offer a steak au poivre recipe. There’s a potential for up- and cross-sell here, as well. Perhaps monsieur would enjoy a nice bottle of cabernet sauvignon with his tender, juicy filet mignon, oui? Just don’t go crazy with it, mon ami. (See 5 and 6, below.)

5. Stay on target.
If your ad specifies John Deere tractors, make sure all of your tractors for sale on that page are John Deere tractors. In other words, if I had been looking for Caterpillar bulldozers I’d have clicked on an ad for them instead.

6. Cut the clutter.
Your landing page should not be too generic and cluttered. This ties in with the tip above. If your ad is for discount wholesale 7Up, don’t clutter the page up with other un-colas. This helps keep the lead focused.

7. Ban the bling.
Your landing page should be cleanly and attractively designed, but avoid distractions like music or other audio, animations and revolving logos. These can distract prospective customers from their purpose, which is to buy the product or service that they need, hopefully from you. Again, keep ‘em focused on the task.

8. Give them something to do.
A little interactivity can help keep people engaged. For some products, especially big-ticket items, things like video testimonials and 360-degree tours may be good sales aids. Just let customers decide whether or not they want to view them by giving them control. And remember Tip 7: Keep the bling to a minimum.

9. Write right.
Language counts. Think of your landing page as a salesperson in a showroom. What would a salesperson say to a prospect to help “get to yes?” Here are a few classic pointers:

• Make sure that your headers and subheads are clear and direct.
• Deliver your value proposition right away.
• Offer a persuasive message near the call-to-action—You know: “Don’t be left out of this amazing offer,” etc.
• Be nice with your call-to-action copy—”Submit” and “Buy Now” can sound like orders and put some people off. “Try it Now” sounds nicer.

For more tips on landing page optimization, visit this page in our Help Center.

—Michael Mattis, Conversion Tipster

Making the Grade

An Intro to Downloading Reports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo! Search Marketing Writer

Oh, What a Tangled Web…

An Intro to Search Submit

Well, call me J. Jonah Jameson! As it turns out, not all spiders spin silken webs. A little deductive reasoning reveals that a Web spider doesn’t spin a web because it’s not an arachnid at all.

A Web spider is, in reality, an automated script that methodically crawls the World Wide Web locating sites for display in search results. It would be virtually impossible to know what is on the Web moment-to-moment without this tool to scan for relevant sites. On the other hand, the extremely dynamic nature of the Web poses a problem for Web spiders, which slowly index the latest updates to the millions of sites on the Web.

Fortunately for those seeking to increase their site’s chances of displaying in non-sponsored (algorithmic) search results, we offer Search Submit. Search Submit is one of the best ways to get additional exposure for your website. It also can help your most pertinent URLs get displayed in response to a search related to your site content. Search Submit comes in two flavors, Basic and Pro, with the Pro version offering the advantage of providing greater control over the way your listings are presented, helping to raise your “click appeal.”

Still not convinced? Compare the standard Web spider search engine refresh rates of every two to six weeks with Search Submit’s search engine site updates of every 48 hours. Even if your site is updated infrequently, you may still want to think about Search Submit should any of the following apply to you:

• Your site is not optimized for Web spiders. Many Web spiders have difficulty indexing sites containing rich media or framed pages.
• Your site contains several pages detailing your product inventory. A searcher entering keywords related to your products may not see your product pages in search results if the spider has not indexed your latest additions.
• Your site contains seasonal offers. Often these special offers need to be made available to searchers more frequently to take advantage of a particular timeframe.

Even Spider-Man eventually picked up the natural ability to shoot webs to augment his highly tuned superpowers. Similarly, you can take advantage of Search Submit to augment your site’s visibility in search results.

—Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo! Search Marketing Writer

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