Posts filed under 'How To's'

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

Pay the Cost to Be the Boss

An Intro to Managing Your Costs

You couldn’t help but purchase that do-it-all knife set for $19.99 after viewing its compelling television commercial. But was it the commercial’s novel product demo that prompted you to dig out your credit card, or was it the illusory pricing method known as psychological pricing? Prices for items using this cost-marketing method typically end in the numbers, nine, eight, or five, with studies showing consumers believe a better deal is received when the ending digit is not zero.

Isn’t it great that you are in charge of how much you spend on your Sponsored Search and Content Match campaigns? By setting custom bids for your keywords and ad groups, the value of clicks and keywords is decided by you.

You can use the following steps to set a maximum bid for your ad groups and keywords:

Setting Max Bids for Your Ad Groups and Keywords

To set an Ad Group bid for one or more ad groups:

1. Click the Campaigns tab.
2. Identify a campaign with optimization off and click its name.
3. Click the checkboxes that correspond to the ad groups you would like to update.
4. Click the “Bid” button.
5. In the Set a Bid dialog box, specify an ad group bid for Sponsored Search, Content Match, or both.
   • For Sponsored Search, specify an ad group bid. This will serve as the default bid for Sponsored Search keywords in your ad group
   • For Content Match, specify an ad group bid.
6. Click the “Submit” button to apply the new bids to the selected ad groups.

Remember, campaign optimization must be turned off to set an ad group bid.

To set a bid for multiple keywords:

1. Click the Campaigns tab and then the Summary subtab.
2. Identify a campaign and click its name.
3. Identify an ad group and click its name.
4. Click the checkboxes that correspond to the keywords for which you want to set bids.
5. Click the “Set Keyword Bids” button.
6. Enter a new bid or bids.
7. Click “Save Changes” to apply the new bids to your keywords. You’ll be brought back to the ad group details page, where your new bids will appear in the table.

Always remember that higher quality ads may add extra value to your campaigns and can help control your costs.

—Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo! Search Marketing Writer

Customers, Conversions and Tracking…Oh my!

A Review of Conversion-only Analytics and the New Conversion Assist Feature

You have a website with searchers visiting your site daily. Sounds like a good approach to distributing information about your product and services and drive sales. The only problem—you are not seeing a rise in sales to correspond with the amount of searchers visiting your site.

Here are a few things you can do today to increase your visitor-to-customer conversions:

• Provide an online form for visitors to complete to gain access to information related to purchase and business decisions, such as a white paper or an industry newsletter.
• Make your site content valuable to visitors by creating persuasive, solution-oriented web content. Adding a testimonial or guarantee of satisfaction is often most compelling.
• Track when visitors sign up for a trade show, request a price quote or respond to any call-to-action so you know which of your marketing strategies are most effective.

A great way to track the habits of visitors and evaluate which of your strategies are the most effective is to turn on our conversion-only analytics feature, which provides conversion and returns data for Sponsored Search and Content Match. Just follow these steps to turn on this feature of your search marketing account:

Enabling Conversion Only Analytics

1. Log in to your Yahoo! Search Marketing account.
2. If you have more than one master account, select the master account that should track the web site. If you do not have more than one master account, proceed to Step 3.
3. Click the “Administration” tab.
4. On the navigation bar below the Administration tab, click on “Analytics.”
5. If analytics are disabled, click the Enable Analytics button..
6. Select “Conversion Only Analytics.” Important: Do not click the “Activate” button. Instead, wait until you have installed the data collection tags on your web site to prevent the collection of inaccurate or partial data.

Copying the Conversion-Only Tag

1. You can customize your tag with a revenue amount and a transaction ID. To do so, you’ll need a text editor that allows you to edit HTML files.
   Click on the panel labeled “Conversion Only” at the bottom of the page, which will display your customized conversion only tag.
2. Underneath the Revenue Value label, select whether your custom conversion-only tag will have a revenue value assigned dynamically, or whether the system should store a default constant value.
   •  To assign a value dynamically, select “Dynamic Value” from the Revenue Value pop-up list and click “Save.”
   • To assign a constant value, select “Constant Average Value” from the Revenue Value pop-up list, enter the revenue amount in the textbox next to the Revenue Value pop-up list, and click “Save.”

3. Once you have installed the tags on your site, repeat steps 1-4 above and click the Activate button to begin tracking your conversions and their returns.

Conversion Assists
As mentioned on the blog a couple weeks back, our conversion analytics feature now has the ability to record “assists,” which can be used to further evaluate which of your terms are performing best. Assists track the number of times a keyword “assisted” in a conversion.

For more information on Yahoo! Search Marketing analytics look up the Analytics Setup Guide in the Help section. Remember, it’s important to upgrade your tags to take full advantage of the new enhanced tracking features. The older Conversion Counter tags will not be supported after July 2007.

—Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo! Search Marketing Writer

Year of the Piggy Bank

An Intro to Deposit/Spend

From the Chinese astrological sign for the year 2007 to the 40-foot floating balloon constructed for the cover of the Pink Floyd album, Animals, the pig has been the subject of many cultural references throughout history. But few other pig depictions are as enduring as the piggy bank.

Unlike a piggy bank, money deposited into your Sponsored Search account doesn’t just sit there. It works for you to fund your online advertising campaigns. Your account balance is determined by the amount deposited into your account and is replenished when your account is “low.” And your account and campaign daily spending limits allow you to set a daily cap on the amount subtracted from your account balance to fund your online advertising campaign.

When you want to add money to your account balance, just follow these steps:

• Click on the Administration tab to view the Account Summary page, which details your account balance in the Billing and Payment Information section.
• Click on the “Add Funds” link to display your current account balance, your account daily spending limit, and any credit cards on file used for payment in the Add Funds screen

Credit Card Charges
An editable field labeled “Amount to Charge” allows you to enter a new amount to charge your credit card when your account balance is “low”. This amount is set by default to the amount of your initial deposit. When the balance in your account is “low,” the system replenishes the funds in your account by charging the amount of your initial deposit, or an amount you have specified, to your designated credit card.

Set Your Limits
You can also manage your account daily spending limit from the Account Summary page. Click the “edit” button in the Account Daily Spending Limit section. The displayed field is populated with your current account daily spending limit. From this screen, you may also view your estimated monthly spending limit and a history of your daily account spending limits.
 
To manage your daily spending limit for a specific campaign, follow these steps:

• Click on the Campaigns tab.
• Click on the campaigns link to view the Campaign Details screen.
• Click on the campaign daily spending limit link in the Campaign Performance section. The resulting screen allows you to update your campaign’s daily spending limit.
• Click on the Display Estimates button to view the estimated monthly clicks and impressions you may receive when setting your spending limit at the amount you enter.

Setting a daily spending limit helps you control the click charges you incur. Your account and/or campaign will go offline when your designated spending limit has been reached, then will resume displaying ads the next day.

Struggling with where to set your daily spending limit? It may help to monitor the amount of traffic received for each campaign in relation to its “return-on-ad-spend” (ROAS).

If only these simple depositing and funding tools existed for piggy bank owners of yore, who were often forced to put hammer to snout as a means of retrieving deposited funds. 

—Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo! Search Marketing Writer

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