Posts filed under 'Strategies'

Common Enemy

Yahoo! and Click Forensics team up to fight click fraud

The enemy of your enemy is supposed to be your friend, right? Well, the biggest enemy of Yahoo!’s traffic quality team is click fraud, which is why we’ve just become friends with click-audit company Click Forensics.

We’ve teamed up with Click Forensics, a well-known click auditor that attempts to track click fraud numbers, including publishing quarterly discard rates. The obvious question is, why would we work with a company that has been a critic of search marketing? Because, frankly, we care so much about click quality that we’re willing to work with anybody who can help us—and our advertisers—drive a better return-on-investment.

About the Partnership

How will we work together? In this new partnership, Click Forensics can act as an intermediary for advertisers and work with us on specific advertiser issues when advertisers request help from both of us.

Click Forensics generally provides a way to help advertisers understand their click data, and now can provide Yahoo! with more information on behalf of the advertiser if there is a question about traffic quality. If you are already a Click Forensics customer, you can also use your Click Forensics reports as the basis of click investigations.

Click Forensics can provide us with additional data that may help us update our traffic-quality measures, so even if you’re not a Click Forensics customer, you can still benefit.

What We Do for You

This fits in pretty nicely with what we’re already doing. Our Click Protection System, one of the best in the industry, typically discards between 12 and 15 percent of clicks before you pay for them.

Coming soon, you’ll be able to see for yourself the clicks that our system identifies and doesn’t charge you for. Our new Click Filter report will show you how many total clicks are being discarded, and the percentage of your total these clicks represent.

Of course, dealing with click fraud is not all we’re doing to improve traffic quality, whether it’s pricing discounts on traffic from certain partner sites, or the ability to block domains from which you don’t want to receive traffic.  But when it comes to getting insight that could improve our traffic quality, a little extra help is always a good thing.

– Reggie Davis, VP of network quality

Slice up Your Advertising Pie

One advertiser’s experience can help you set up your budgets right

One of the reps on our Customer Solutions team recently took a call from a new advertiser, who had run into a roadblock that left him perplexed.

Apparently he awoke one morning at 3:00 a.m., his brain churning with an idea for a campaign for a product he sells on his site. He jumped on the computer to set up the new campaign, picking keywords, writing ads and setting bids. Feeling confident that this new campaign was going to get a ton of clicks, he set a daily spending limit of $50 and went back to bed.

But a few days later, when he checked its results, he discovered that the campaign was getting capped at about $20 in clicks each day. Care to guess what the problem was? (I’ll wait…)

And the answer is: He forgot to check if he had enough room in his account budget for the new campaign.

Too Many Hands in the Pie
This tale makes an important point: One tweak to an account can affect everything else. Think of your account budget as your “money pie”; you have to slice it up just right. Each of your campaigns will take a piece.

So if you add a new campaign, its spend will eat up a portion of the pie, leaving less spend for your existing campaigns. The account budget trumps other spending limits; you can’t spend more than your account limit. This seems like an obvious fact, but as our unwitting advertiser discovered, it can be lost in the excitement of launching a new campaign. To make room for the new campaign, you might have to consider reducing the spend from other campaigns, so that all of your “slices” add up to the total account budget.

If you’re off balance—no matter how high you set the daily spend of your biggest campaign—your other campaigns could be shut off as our system works to keep you from going over your budget. In this case, you’d need to either bake a bigger account pie, or cut your campaigns into smaller slices. Who’s hungry?

Cooking up the Perfect Search Marketing Plan
Before creating a new campaign, think about how much money you have to work with across your entire account. Then set up your campaign budgets to spend their portions of the account budget accordingly. As you tinker around with budgets, if you’re not sure how your changes will play out, make sure you take advantage of the forecasting tools in your account. As you enter different bid amounts, it analyzes statistics to help predict what your average position could potentially be in the search results, and thus, what your potential is for impressions and clicks.

Don’t “Set and Forget”
You should always be monitoring all parts of your account on a regular basis. This is your business and your money, so get in the habit of scanning all of the information on the dashboard.

If you simply “set and forget,” you’re giving up one of the biggest advantages that search marketing has over any other advertising vehicles—the ability to change, re-adjust, tinker and refocus your strategies at any time to reach your target audience. And take a lesson from one of your colleagues: If you decide to make any changes, consider how they will affect the daily spends set for your individual campaigns, and your account as a whole. You’ll sleep much better at night for it!

— Kastle Waserman, Communications Manager, Customer Solutions

Blueberry pie picture from hfb on Flickr

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.