Posts filed under 'Updates & Enhancements'

Throw the Bad Clicks Out

New report lets you know how many clicks we’re discarding for you

Our Click Protection System works around the clock to identify clicks we believe you shouldn’t have to pay for—but until now, you had to take our word for it.  Now you can use our new Click Filter Report to find out how many clicks we’re throwing out.   

Who needs a click filter report?

We created the report for a few reasons:

• We want to give you as much transparency as we can
• We want to add to the tools at your disposal for monitoring your own traffic. 
• We believe our Click Protection System is one of the best in the industry, and we want you to see what it does for your account.

This report will help you understand how many clicks we are recording and how many of the ones we do record are deemed invalid.  You can compare that information to the clicks you’re seeing through your weblogs or third party products and, if something doesn’t seem quite right, you can submit a click investigation request to our team.

Why your discarded clicks might be different 

We typically discard between 12 and 15 percent of all clicks, but your account may or may not be “typical.” There can be a number of reasons for this.  Click fraud perpetrators can target one industry more than another, or attack more frequently in one month than another, or focus on one product more than another. 

While click fraud can be unpredictable, we can and do detect patterns .  If you notice a spike in the Click Filter Report—for example, your discard rate goes from 7 percent to 21 percent— that means your invalid clicks increased, but our Click Protection System caught them.  

How to use it

You can find the Click Filter Report in the same location as all other account reports, by clicking the “Reports” tab, then selecting “Click Filter” under the “Traffic Quality Reports” section in the Reports Navigator on the left side of the screen.

The Click Filter Report provides information for any timeframe you want. You can customize the report to include data such as impressions, invalid clicks, invalid click rate, and average cost-per-click. Additionally, if you are using our analytics tools, you can track data such as click conversion rate and revenue.

You can choose to view this data across your entire account or by campaign, by distribution tactic, or by specifying certain campaigns by name via the search function. If you have multiple accounts, the report can display data from all of your accounts simultaneously.

This report follows other recent traffic quality measures we’re undertaking. And now you’ll have a little more visibility into exactly what we’re doing for you.

– Reggie Davis, VP of Network Quality

Minimum Bids No Longer Fixed at $.10

How to manage your new Sponsored Search minimum bids

Starting today, minimum bids for some Sponsored Search keywords will no longer be fixed at $.10. Throughout the next week, you may start noticing new minimum bids on some of your keywords. Your new minimum bids can be lower or higher than $.10. Content Match minimum bids currently will remain at $.10. We’ll notify you in the account interface when the status of any of your keywords is affected.

How Your Bids Work

The new minimum bids are a little bit like auction house reserve prices, and can be based on multiple factors, such as your keyword quality and the keyword’s value—or how much we think that keyword is worth. Here’s a look at the two main factors:

Quality—High quality generally means that your ads are being clicked more often, relative to your competitors. We try to reward quality with higher rankings and lower costs, and now, potentially, with lower minimum bids.

Value—We look at a number of things to determine what a keyword is worth: for example, how many advertisers are bidding on your keyword, and what they’re willing to pay for it.

A keyword term becomes “active”— or eligible for display—when your bid is equal to or greater than your minimum bid. Keywords become inactive when your bid falls below your minimum. You will be notified in an alert on your Account Dashboard if the minimum bid for a keyword increases above your current bid, and you’ll have a grace period of up to several days to raise your bid to keep your keyword active.

Managing the Change

There are three steps you can take to manage this change, which we wrote about in recent blog posts:

1. Get to know your keywords and their value.

2. Improve your ad quality.

3. Use the new updates to the account interface.

Sign up for our webinar for more information.

—The Team

Crunch Time

Tear yourself away from The Madness for a few minutes to take a closer look at your keywords in light of the upcoming minimum bid change

It’s March, and all across this land of ours, people are hard at work on their computers, trying to figure out…who could win the NCAA basketball tournament. Is Davidson for real, is UCLA the team to beat—or is it Tennessee, North Carolina, or some fabled “Cinderella” team?

Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers may want to put down their brackets for a few minutes and spend an equal amount of time taking a deep dive into their pool of keywords, because with the upcoming change to the way minimum bids are set, it’s a whole new game.

Staying Off the Bubble

In the next few weeks, the switch will be flipped on this new feature, and with it come both opportunities and potential pitfalls. If you have keywords with minimum bids that go down, you may be able to reallocate your money to other keywords or by expanding your keyword roster. Conversely, if you have minimum bids that are headed north, it would be good to know whether you should raise your bids or let the associated keywords go inactive.

You can get ready for the tip-off of the new minimum bid feature by taking a closer look at your keywords, both now and after the new bid requirements are in play. Here are some suggestions on where to focus your efforts:

1. Learn which keywords work best for your business.

• Identify your most important keywords by comparing their click-through rates, click volume and performance metrics.
• Add these all-star keywords to your “watched keywords” list for easy reference going forward.
• Continue to monitor performance metrics regularly to identify changes, both positive and negative.

2. Put your trust in your proven winners.

• Invest more of your budget in keywords that are doing well, and get rid of poorly performing ones.
• Review their bids and make sure you are bidding to the true value of the keyword.
• Diversify: If minimum bids are raised on some of your keywords, find some that remain at lower levels and make them more prominent in your lineup.
• Set bids at the keyword level, when appropriate, for greater control.

3. Group relevant keywords together.

• Keywords in a single ad group should relate to each other and to the ads in your ad group. This can have a big impact on your quality score, and, potentially, your minimum bids.
• Move more general keywords into their own ad group(s) so they don’t affect the quality of your targeted ad groups.

4. Budget wisely.

• Have an understanding of what you can spend, so if you do face a situation where minimum bids are higher, you can decide whether to raise bids or increase budgets.
• As you set bids, make sure that they meet your ad budget and acquisition targets.

— Jeff Hecox, Bracketologist “Keywordologist”

Photo courtesy dearth85 via Flickr.

Reserve Prices

Minimum bids no longer fixed at $.10 for Sponsored Search

If you go to any auction, whether it’s Sotheby’s, eBay or your rural county’s hog auction, there’s usually a reserve price (or minimum bid) set according to what is believed to be the minimum value of the product. It’s their way of making sure that no one walks away with a cheap Van Gogh just because people aren’t lifting those paddles fast enough.

Following the auction model, we are changing the way we set the minimum bids required to participate in a Sponsored Search keyword market. In the next several weeks, we will start calculating a variable minimum bid for some of the keywords you’re bidding on. That means that sometimes the minimum bid may be lower than 10¢. Sometimes it may be higher. Content Match minimum bids currently will remain at 10¢.

What your minimum bid means

An auction house has guidelines it keeps in mind when it sets a minimum bid, or the reserve price—how rare a painting is, how famous the guy who painted it is, things like that. We have guidelines that help us set minimum bids, too. Minimum bids can be based on multiple factors, including the quality of the keyword and its value—or how much we think that keyword is worth to its bidders. Here’s how we do it:

Quality—If you haven’t noticed before, we like quality. High quality generally means that your ads are being clicked more often, relative to your competitors. And that usually means that searchers are finding what they want more readily. So we try to reward quality—first with higher rankings and lower costs, and now, potentially, with lower minimum bids.

Value—While figuring out the value of a keyword can be complicated, we may look at a number of things to determine what it’s worth: for example, how many advertisers are bidding on your keyword, and what they’re willing to pay for it. (Note: we do not use conversion data to determine minimum bids.)

A keyword term becomes “active”—switched “on” in the system and eligible for display—when your bid is equal to or greater than your minimum bid. Keywords become inactive when your bid falls below your minimum. You will be notified in an alert on your Account Dashboard if your bid is about to drop below your minimum, and you’ll have a grace period of up to a few days to raise your bid to keep your keyword active.

What you can do to prepare

A lot of the best practices that are always important in search marketing are especially important when you’re managing your minimum bids. Here are some of the best ways to manage your account:

Get to know your keywords and their value. Since variable minimum bids may be set for each of your keywords, it is important to know which ones work best for your business.

Improve your ad quality. Better ad quality can potentially translate into lower minimum bids.  Plus, it also affects the price you pay per click and your ads’ position in search results.

Learn about updates to the account interface. To help make your bids easier to manage, we are offering some enhancements to your account interface. These include a new search and management tool that allows you to find keywords that are below the minimum bid—bids too low for your keyword to become active—within a selected ad group or campaign.

For more about this change, read our FAQs.

—The Team

Introducing All-You-Can-Eat Web Hosting

Beginning today, Yahoo! Web Hosting has gone “unlimited”

Editor’s Note: If you have a web site or want to build one—and since you’re doing search marketing, we’re guessing that’s probably the case—Yahoo! has good news for you. Starting today, our colleagues in Yahoo! Small Business are offering unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited e-mail storage to their web hosting customers.

Yahoo! Small Business customers have told us loud and clear that they want getting online to be as easy and painless as possible. Instead of worrying about things like, “How many visitors can my site handle?” and “How many pages can I build?,” small business owners want to focus on growing their businesses and driving traffic to their sites, feeling comfortable knowing their hosting package will grow with their business.

The new Yahoo! Web Hosting offers unlimited disk space, unlimited data transfer, unlimited email storage and 1,000 email accounts—all for $11.95 a month. For the very large majority of small business owners who want a professional-looking site in hours, the decision to choose Yahoo! has suddenly become much easier.

Don’t know the first thing about web design? No sweat. Every Yahoo! Small Business service includes award-winning, easy-to-use web site design tools that can help business owners with little or no technical experience to quickly and easily build great-looking sites. You’ll also get a free domain name and 24/7 customer support, plus your satisfaction is guaranteed for 30 days. And if that wasn’t enough, Yahoo! Small Business automatically optimizes your web site and submits it to top search engines (I can think of a pretty good one) to help customers find your business.

Existing web hosting customers have already received an email invitation with the option to migrate to this new plan. If you’re not an existing customer and you want to get your business online, please visit Yahoo!’s Web Hosting site for more information.

Now go spread out. There’s plenty of room!

— Guy Yalif, Director, Web Hosting Products, Yahoo! Small Business

New Year, New System Upgrades

YaHal-9000’s Predictions Come True

You’ll remember the predictions from our master computer—YaHal-9000, a.k.a. The Exalted One—which we posted a few weeks back. One had already been realized at the time it was posted, but as of today yet another has already come to pass. No, not Number 4 (The Donald still has his head), but Number 3.

We told you that we’d continue to roll out new enhancements to the system in the New Year, and today we’re announcing the first set of them. We’re hoping these improvements will help you to generate more effective keywords faster, help you better target your keywords for search, better track your metrics, and stay up to date on your campaign tune-ups.

New Keyword Generator Options
Brain hurting from thinking of new keywords? We’ve substantially enhanced the keyword generator tool. You now have three easy options for adding keywords to existing ad groups, all accessible in a single drop-down menu.

Quick Add—Lets you add up to 500 keywords directly if you know what you already want.

Choose from List—We provide a list of related keywords based on the existing keywords in your ad group, from which you can select.

Research Keywords—A shortcut to the existing keyword generator interface, which generates keyword suggestions based on descriptions of your business or based on your website URL.

To try the new options, click the Campaigns tab, then on any ad group. You’ll see the drop-down on your ad group summary page.

Excluded Keywords
Now with more exclusion! We’ve expanded the maximum number of account-level and ad group-level excluded keywords from 50 to 250, which should help you better target searches and block unwanted ones. Excluded keywords are only applicable to the Advanced match type distribution tactic in Sponsored Search. (Even if you could use them in Standard match, it wouldn’t make any sense.) Remember, excluded words can be set at the account level (under the Administration tab) and the ad group level (in the ad group setting page).

Here are a couple of tips for using excluded keywords:
• Identify the keywords that do not apply to your business but may be commonly used by potential customers. For example, if you only sell new TVs, you may want to exclude words such as “repair” and “used.”
• Be selective when choosing your excluded keywords at the account level, since they apply to all keywords in your account.

Enhanced Ad Optimization
We’d be the first to say that there’s more to search marketing than clicks. Ad optimization now lets you optimize your ads for conversions, revenue or impressions— not just for clicks—so that the ads that best meet the metrics you set are shown more frequently. You can set your optimization guidelines at the campaign or ad group level. If you use conversion tags, your ads’ display will be automatically optimized for revenue or conversions, but you can change your settings at any time.

Tuning-up Campaign Tune-up
Ding! Your campaign tune-up is done. OK, there’s no actual sound, but now when you run our recently announced campaign tune-up in the background, you’ll receive an alert in your dashboard telling you to check it out.

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

Block Your Ads from Appearing on Certain Sites

“Blocked Domains” is now available for advertisers

As you already know, your ads appear on a network of sites, not just on Yahoo.com. But you may not want your ads to appear on some sites—maybe they’re competitors of yours, or maybe they sell products or offer content with which you don’t want your brand to be associated.

A new feature allows you to specify up to 250 websites or sections of websites in our partner distribution network on which you don’t want your ads to appear. These can be:

• An entire domain (i.e., example.net)
• One subdomain (i.e., blog.example.net)
• Up to two directories in a particular domain (e.g., example.net/directory)

It applies to sites that are using either our Sponsored Search or Content Match products. Please note that the Yahoo.com domain remains unblockable.

To block a domain, just follow these steps:

• Log into your account
• Click the Administration tab
• Select the “Accounts” section
• Next to “Blocked Domains,” either click “Submit Domains” or “Edit”
• Complete the provided steps to block (or unblock) the domains

Click here for more info. 

—Michael Mattis

Updates Great and Small

More Customizable, Easier to Navigate

Fast on the heels of our last release, today we announce several new features and enhancements, many based on your requests.

Custom Reports and Scheduling
One popular request from our advertisers is the ability to customize and schedule reports. Well, voila! Starting today, you’ll be able to customize your reports based on date range, filter criteria and data columns. You can also choose to have your reports emailed to you at intervals that you specify: daily, weekly or monthly. In addition, you can choose the format in which you’d like to receive them, including XML, TSV or CSV for Excel.

Going Lateral
Another request from our advertisers is the ability to move laterally from one detail page to another without having to backtrack to a summary page. Now, you’ll notice, we’ve added “Previous” and “Next” buttons to your campaign, ad group and keyword pages to help make it easier to navigate around your account. You will also see the relative location of the particular campaign, ad group or keyword page you’re on in at any given time in relation to the others: for example: “3 of 23 Ad Groups.” You can also navigate this way through search results.

This navigation aid also lets you move more easily among campaigns, ad groups and keywords that are in the top performers or watched lists in your account.

The Today Show
In the calendar widget that appears in the upper right of the page under your Campaigns and Reports tabs, you can now select “Today,” from the “Custom Date Range” drop-down menu. Your default setting will still be the previous two weeks unless you select a custom date range. Whatever range you choose will then become your new default.

A Little Help from Your Friends
We’re always bugging you to make sure your ads meet our editorial guidelines. Now we’re providing easier access to our guidelines from those places in the interface where it is most relevant: the Create Your Ad, Choose Keywords and Editorial Status pages.

Keep the feedback coming, folks. It really helps us improve the system.

—Michael Mattis

Driving Traffic Quality

A Roundup of Our Latest Efforts

Quality traffic.

For you, the advertiser, this means qualified clicks from users most likely to become customers. As a part of our ongoing effort to improve the quality of the network and your traffic, we have undertaken several initiatives. The newest of these is a feature called “Blocked Domains,” which allows you to specify certain sites in our partner distribution network on which you do not want your ads to appear.

The new Blocked Domains feature, which launches later this month, is just the latest among several initiatives we are undertaking in order to in order to provide increased value. Others include:

Discounts
You may automatically receive pricing discounts based on our assessment of the quality of traffic coming from our partner distribution network.

Click protection
We have installed a system to track and identify clicks that we believe shouldn’t be billed to our advertisers.

Intercontinental traffic control
“Blocked Continents,” a recent enhancement, automatically excludes traffic from continents other than North America. If intercontinental traffic is important to your business, however, you can easily change this setting by going into your Administration tab and clicking “Account General Information.”

To learn more about what we’re doing around network quality, I invite you to visit our new Traffic Quality Center.

—Reggie Davis, Vice President, Network Quality

Photo courtesy rrazor, via Flickr

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