Posts filed under 'Updates & Enhancements'

Display for the Rest of Us

Yahoo! My Display Ads offers self-serve display ads

Display ads have not always been the friendliest form of online advertising for the little guy—you had to have hefty advertising budgets, and you had to have agencies or other creative types around to build your ads in the first place. But our new Yahoo! My Display Ads, with a lower spending minimum and do-it-yourself graphic ads, just made display advertising a lot friendlier.

Yahoo! My Display Ads, a pilot program being launched this week, puts display advertising within reach of advertisers who were previously limited to search marketing. Advertisers can upload existing  ads, or build their own from more than 700 templates. And, unlike traditional display, you can get started with as little as $30 a day.

Display for people who like search
If you’re a search advertiser, why would you want to run display ads, even if you can build them? Some search advertisers are under the impression that display doesn’t perform as well as search. But that’s not quite true—display can make your search campaigns more powerful.

Display can reach users at a different point in your sales cycle than search does—at the beginning of the purchase process, when they’re still open to multiple products, rather than further along when they’re looking for a particular product. Getting in front of someone with display ads when they’re in an open mindset can influence whether people search for you or not when they are ready to buy. According to a 2008 Specific Media study, people who saw a display ad for a product were 155% more likely to search for that product than those who didn’t.

If you want to tie your display campaign to specific performance goals, though, Yahoo! My Display Ads lets you choose from two pricing models: cost per impression (CPM), the traditional display model, or cost per click (CPC), which is more like search marketing. With a cost per click model, you’re not paying for people to look at your ad—you only pay when your ad is clicked.

Creatives for the non-creative types
Even if you don’t have a creative bone in your body, you should be able to build an ad with Yahoo! My Display Ads. You pick a display ad template for your type of business—education, consumer products, travel, and so on. If you don’t know what will work, you can get a sense of which templates are working well for other advertisers. Then you can customize the template with your logo, headlines, copy,  colors, even other images. The Ad Customizer tool will show you what your ad will look like in multiple display ad sizes.

Once you build your ad, you can run it on the Yahoo! network as a non-guaranteed display ad. (Advertisers who are managed by a Yahoo! account team can also run their ads on other sites through the Right Media Exchange.) You can also select the demographic, geographic  and content segments you want to target. (Keep in mind, though, that the more you target, the less potential traffic you may receive. We recommend starting broad and working your way smaller.) Our managed model also allows for additional targeting features such as behavioral targeting and ad scheduling.

Not sure if this is for you? The best way to figure that out is to go to our demonstration site and check Yahoo! My Display Ads out for yourself. You can play with the ads and customize them any way you want before you sign up. If you want more information or are ready to get started, visit the Yahoo! My Display Ads home page or contact your account manager.

Time to get creative!

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

Display That Performs Like Search

Yahoo! expands Smart Ads program with new partnerships

What if you had a display ad that could be customized for a target audience with a variety of images, colors or messages? What if that ad could evolve as Yahoo! discovers more about the users looking at it? And what if that ad helped your display campaign perform more like your search campaigns?

That’s what an ad can do when it’s part of our Smart Ads program, which we’re expanding this week. Smart Ads takes different elements of ads and combines them in more ways than you can probably imagine to give customized messages to prospective clients. The program now helps deliver Smart Ads at greater scale by combining Yahoo!’s reach and user knowledge with innovative ad-serving technology from third-party providers. Smart Ads is an open platform, but Yahoo! is initially working with two partners, Teracent and Tumri, to make Smart Ads available to PC and mobile advertisers.

“Other publishers will offer so-called smart ad campaigns, but if it’s not running on the Yahoo! Network, it’s not as smart as it could be,” says David Zinman, vice-president and general manager of display advertising at Yahoo!. “We’re giving marketers the opportunity to reach consumers with customized ads on the PC and mobile Internet, and given the high performance of these campaigns in initial testing, it’s as if we’ve put performance marketing on steroids.”

Get specific
You may have a particular group of advertisers you’re trying to reach. But there are lots of different kinds of people within a demographic group, with different interests and backgrounds —and not every consumer will respond to a message the same way.

For example, you could set up a telecommunications ad campaign targeting 18-to-45-year-old cell phone users in Los Angeles. That demographic could contain everyone from a 28-year-old female hipster to a 43-year-old blue-collar male. And they would all see the same ad, which might look something like this:

Yahoo! has 150 million users who spent 43 billion minutes on our site last month—which means we have a lot of data that we can use to break those groups into much smaller behavioral segments. The woman might visit Yahoo! Music to check out The Decemberists, while the man might visit Yahoo! Finance. So we can start figuring out what kinds of messages they might be interested in. (Keeping in mind our privacy policies, of course.)

That’s where Smart Ads’ machine-learning technology comes in. You could prepare a few taglines, offers, images, logos and colors, and Smart Ads technology combines them to create thousands of ads that can be displayed to your potential customers. Our mobile Smart Ads can even take into account things like the local weather.

As people like our hipster and our blue-collar guy click on ads, our systems learn what combinations people like them want to see. Is the hipster more interested in convenience and multimedia? Is the blue-collar guy more interested in cost?

In not too long, the 43-year-old man might see more ads like this:

Meanwhile, the 32-year-old female might see an ad like this:

Display that performs like search
Because these combinations can be finely tuned to match customized messages with users, Smart Ads can help the right ads be displayed to the right users. So far, advertisers testing Smart Ads have seen significantly improved campaign performance based on a variety of metrics, including click performance, conversion and overall return on investment.

For example, after executing several Smart Ad campaigns with Yahoo! and its partners, Hewlett-Packard saw a return on ad spend that was more than 20 times higher than their traditional display campaigns, and on par with their search marketing campaigns.

“The ability to run a display advertising campaign that can match the ROI of my search marketing spend is a potentially game-changing proposition,” says Catherine Paschkewitz, director of demand generation with HP Direct. “The Smart Ad solution has enabled us to increase our ROI by reaching the right set of users with the right message.”

Plus, after you’ve run a Smart Ad campaign, we can give you reporting data all the way down to the conversion that tells you which groups responded to which messages. That can help you even when you’re setting up traditional offline campaigns, and make all of your advertising that much smarter.

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

The Favicon Marks Your Spot

Yahoo! tests favicons with popular search ad results

It’s good for everybody when a user searching for your website can quickly identify that your ad belongs to you. That’s why we’re rolling out a new icon that helps searchers spot your site at a glance.

We’re testing a program that uses favicons, the little icons that show up on your browser next to the address window when you’re on a page—say, on Expedia.com. These favicons are already widely in use on the Web. Now, when a user searches for “Expedia,” or another search that matches your domain name, that same favicon will show up next to the URL in your ad. It’ll look something like this:

What good does that do anyone? Well, it’s just one more way for users to know they’re really looking at your site, which will improve the search experience. And if they know you’re really what they searched for, they may click on you more frequently, helping your click-through rate and improving your quality score.

Keep in mind that this is a test, and we’re only trying it out on select advertisers. As such, you can’t sign up for it just yet if you’re not one of the early advertisers who are piloting the project. However, if you’re bidding on your own domain name and you have a favicon.ico file on your site, you may be eligible to participate. 

Not interested in participating? Just contact us to let us know that you’d like out. (Or, for that matter, if you’d like in when it opens up further.)  We’ll be sure to keep you posted as the program evolves.

  —Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

Serious Analytics

Yahoo! Web Analytics now available for search and display advertisers

If you’re an advertiser in need of some serious analytics, you’ve probably been watching for our Yahoo! Web Analytics enterprise tool—and you’ll be glad to know that it’s now available for free to search and display advertisers supported by a Yahoo! account team. 

If you haven’t been watching for it, you may wonder why you should care. “Yahoo!’s emerging Web Analytics service surpasses Google in several key categories relevant to enterprises,” says a recent report from independent analyst firm CMS Watch. Search advertisers can use Yahoo! Web Analytics to track performance of their campaigns—not just Yahoo! Search Marketing, but campaigns on other search engines, display campaigns, even email campaigns—from click to conversion.

Yahoo! Web Analytics offers user insight that you’re not likely to find in other free analytics tools, including demographic and behavioral insight on your website visitors, near-real-time reporting, and visibility into as many as 50 different types of actions that take place on your site.

Here are some of the questions that Yahoo! Web Analytics can help advertisers and agencies answer:

How am I performing?  
Yahoo! Web Analytics gives you customizable reports, dashboards, alerts and segmentation tools that let you slice up data to figure out what’s working, and what isn’t. You can identify opportunities to improve ads, campaigns, keyword bids and website design. 

Who are my audiences?
This new version helps you take advantage of our recent demographic targeting options by helping you identify the age, gender, city, and online interests—and finding out who your most valuable audience is so that you can reach more of it.

How can I improve engagement and conversions? 
It’s one thing to get people to your site—but what you really want is to keep them there and buying your products or services. This new version of Yahoo! Web Analytics can track up to 15 steps of your conversion process to see where you’re most liable to lose someone.

The new version is available for any of our advertisers who work with an account manager, but it’s most suited for large advertisers with complex analytical needs and the resources to set up and manage analytics.

If you think it is the right tool for you, contact your account manager to get started.  Visit our website for more information. If you’re not quite ready or aren’t eligible for Yahoo! Web Analytics, look into our Full Analytics or Conversion Only Analytics in our Sponsored Search user interface.

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

Those Who Matter Most

Finding your favorite customers is easier now with demographic targeting

You know your audience — especially those whose clicks are likely to convert. This is the driving force behind the recent launch of our demographic targeting.

Demographic bidding (also known as targeting) allows you to take advantage of the knowledge you already have about your audience and focus your spending on specific age range and gender segments. Demographic bidding is available for both Sponsored Search and Content Match in both the user interface and through our APIs.

Want to increase the likelihood that your ad is in a premium position for men in their 40s? Or perhaps your particular product is geared more toward women in their mid-to-late 30s?  In either case, now you can simply increase your ad group or keyword bid for a particular group with a bid adjustment.  When a user who matches your specified age group and/or gender performs a search on one of your keywords, your ad will have a higher tendency to show up toward the top of the page because of your increased bid.

At the same time, using bid adjustments on your desired demo groups doesn’t mean you’ll have to give up traffic from other groups. For age ranges and/or genders where you don’t adjust your bid, our systems will match your ad just as they do today to determine how and when to show your ad for searches.

Why use demographic targeting
Thinking through the groups you want to target, and adding the appropriate bid adjustments, will require a little bit of account management time initially. But targeting demographically can translate to an improved return on investment when your ads become more visible to users who fit your target prospect profile. These are the prospective customers who are probably more interested in what you’re offering, and are more likely to convert. That will give you more of a competitive edge.

If you aren’t yet sure which age ranges or gender react best to your product, you can use demographic reporting to learn which groups are clicking more on your ads.  For example, it might show you that women are clicking on your ads and buying your product for their spouses far more often than the men you’ve been targeting with your ads all along.  Armed with this information, you can adjust your offers, creatives, and spending to maximize your sales and return on your advertising spend.

How to use it
You can easily activate demographic bidding for a campaign or ad group by targeting any age range or gender with a bid adjustment or by simply clicking on the “”turn on demographic bidding” checkbox where you set your demo targeting. For more details on getting started and using demographic bidding, visit our help center.

One additional thing to keep in mind: The bid adjustments that you set for various demographic groups are added together if a user matches more than one criterion. For example, if you set a bid adjustment of 15% for female prospects and 25% for ages 30 to 34, you would bid 40% (15%+25%) more than your ad group or keyword bid for a click from a 32-year-old woman.

— Malin Kennedy, Senior Manager, Traffic Quality

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Kate Mereand

Right on Schedule

How to take advantage of the new ad scheduling tools to help improve your ROI

When talking about their Tivo or another type of digital video recorder, people often say, “It’s changed my life.” That might serve as an indictment about Americans’ overindulgence with television, but at the heart of that sentiment is the powerful ability to control the timing of their TV experience, both by “time-shifting” their viewing and zipping through the commercials.

That type of time control is also at the heart of our new ad scheduling feature, which we introduced last month. Ad scheduling allows you to control the days or times in which users may see your ad, so it’s akin to the “dayparting” options long offered by traditional offline advertising. You also now have the ability to price clicks received at certain times differently than others, using bid adjustments.

To schedule or not to schedule
First you must decide whether using ad scheduling will help your business. The key thing to think about is when your business is open and closed, and when customers respond best to your advertising. When your business is closed, can you handle incoming leads? For example, can you take voicemails that you’ll respond to when you reopen?

If not, you may still find value in attracting interested customers simply to tell them more about your business (i.e., branding). In this situation, you may want to lower your bids for the “closed” hours, but still leave your campaigns active during that time.

Another consideration is that using ad scheduling may reduce your overall traffic if it is used as a filter (example: your ads are displayed nine hours per day vs. 24). To help guard against that result, you may want to use bid adjustments to increase traffic for your strongest times of day or days of week.

If you’ve made the decision to try ad scheduling, you can pick the times at which users may see your ads in two different ways:

Audience Time Zone targeting
The first ad scheduling option, Audience Time Zone, allows you to set a range of time for which all users are eligible to see your ads (subject to geo-targeting and other filters, of course). This time period will be consistent across all time zones. For example, if you set an Audience Time Zone target of 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., search users in the Pacific time zone could see your ads between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Pacific time, while users in the Eastern time zone could see your ads between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Eastern time.

Some of our largest competitors do not offer this capability, which could be useful to businesses that are open around the clock (like a fully automated website), or businesses that span multiple time zones. Conversely, if you’re using geo-targeting to only reach prospects in a small area (that is contained within a single time zone), there’s no need to target by audience time zone.

Account Time Zone targeting
The second option, Account Time Zone, allows you to set an absolute time period during which users may see your ads. So, if your account is based on the Pacific time zone and you set a 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. range, your ads could be seen between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Pacific time and between 11:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. Eastern time.

This option would be useful to businesses that have a set number of hours in the day during which new orders can be taken. Another way to use the Account Time Zone option is if you want to target a specific live event during the time it’s occurring, like the Super Bowl.

Even if you don’t think you have a need for ad scheduling based on the above scenarios, you may want to test it solely for increasing your return-on-ad-spend (ROAS). If you choose this strategy, be sure to use the conversion-tracking tools in your account and check your reports frequently. If you find that one time period performs better than others, think about using bid adjustments to try to win more of that traffic.

— Jeff Hecox and the Product Management Team

On Target

Three new ways to help you reach the people you want

We try not to oversell the changes we make to Sponsored Search — sometimes a button is just a button, after all. So, we hope you’ll pay attention when we tell you this: the new targeting features we’re adding right now are kind of a big deal.

Starting now, you’ll be able to target the audiences you want, when and where you want them, with a lot more control. We are rolling out demographic targeting, ad scheduling (which you might know as dayparting), and enhanced ZIP-level geo-targeting at the ad group and campaign level.

Why target? Well, that may already be clear to you as a marketer, but we’ll take a stab at explaining it anyway: if you can get an ad more frequently in front of the people you want to see it, who are disposed to respond favorably to it, it’s likely to give you a better return on investment.

Demographic targeting
You can now select your desired audiences on Yahoo! sites — in both Sponsored Search and Content Match — by age and gender, and set a premium bid for those groups. With demographic targeting, you can take advantage of Yahoo!’s wide user base and its deep understanding of its audience. Our demographic targeting uses a concept called bid adjustments, which let you set a premium bid for the categories that are worth more to you without losing other traffic volume. 

Ad scheduling
If the people you most want to reach are most likely to respond to your ad at certain times of the day, or your business is only open certain hours, you can select what time of day and day of the week you’d like your campaigns to run. You can schedule ads to be shown according to users’ time zones or according to your time zone. Ad scheduling works in both Sponsored Search and Content Match, and at the ad group and campaign levels. 

Enhanced ZIP-level geo-targeting
An update to our beta ZIP-level targeting feature, advertisers will have even more control about how geo-targeting is used. Available for both Sponsored Search and Content Match, you can mix and match geo-targeting settings at different levels within the same campaign or ad group. New dynamic mapping features help you select individual ZIP codes and ZIP codes surrounding them.

This is a lot to swallow in one sitting, so we’ll be following this post with closer looks at each of these new features. You can also sign up for a webinar to learn more. But don’t wait for us — get targeting.

— Jeff Sweat, blog editor

Photo courtesy of Flickr user gertys.

Lower Reserves

Minimum bids dropping on some keywords

You don’t need a TV to tell you that times are tough—you just have to take a look at your marketing budget. Money is tight for everyone these days. So we thought you’d want to know about some changes that we hope will help lower your costs and increase your clicks.

Given that certain business categories have been impacted by the current economic conditions, we’ve reviewed minimum bid amounts on a large number of Sponsored Search keywords and reduced the minimum bids on many terms. This review process is a part of our ongoing efforts to optimize our search marketplace.

Some of these changes to minimum bids have already taken place. Please log in and review your account, as you may find that a number of your keyword bids that used to be below the minimum requirement may now be active if their minimum bids have been lowered. These keywords will automatically reactivate (and start displaying your ads), so make sure that your spending limits allow for additional traffic.

Keep in mind that the minimum bid is only one factor in the cost you pay per click. Just as important are factors such as your ad quality, the competitiveness of your term and, of course, the bid you set. Still, at least on some keywords, this should translate into a little bit of good news for you. You won’t get that on the TV.

—The Team

Keyword Suggestions, Just for You

New sections of Help Center offer industry-specific data and ideas for new search terms

Were you one of those advertisers who lamented the passing of Overture’s late, great Search Term Suggestion Tool (STST)? If so, you may find some comfort in a new section of the Yahoo! Search Marketing Help Center, which includes industry-specific keywords that could be relevant to your business.

Why wait? Take a visit now to our Help Center, where you’ll find:

• Industry-specific market research articles that include online and search data, which can help you understand the role that search, online research and purchasing play in your industry.
• Industry-specific keywords with considerable search volume but typically fewer competing advertisers. Adding these keywords to your campaigns may help increase your traffic volume and improve overall campaign performance.

The reports and keywords described above are available for the following industries: Apparel, Automotive, Education, Financial Services, Healthcare, Home Improvement, Legal Services, Travel and Wireless Services.

Not doing business in any of those categories? The STST’s revved-up replacement, the Add Keywords tool, is standing by in your account to help you dig up more gems. It’s located on your Ad Group details page; just click on “Add Keywords,” then select one of three options: “Quick Add,” “Choose from List” or “Research Keywords.”

— Jeff Hecox

New Ad Targeting Products Announced

Helping marketers reach the audiences they value

Today Yahoo! announced the launch of new products and features that will help online advertisers reach their target audiences more easily and efficiently. Two of them are meant for display ads:

Search Retargeting, which gives advertisers the ability to target display advertising based on user search activities. For example, if a user searches for the keyword “sandals,” indicating strong purchase intent, an advertiser can target that user with a tailored display ad for footwear.

The University of Phoenix found that Search Retargeting helped it achieve an effective cost per lead at the same level as its search campaign, and 50% cheaper than its regular display retargeting efforts.

Enhanced Retargeting, which allows advertisers to deliver dynamically generated display ads across the Yahoo! network based on user activity on an advertiser’s site. For example, users who visit an airline website to check offers for flights from SFO-JFK can be served a personalized offer for that specific flight when they visit a page within the Yahoo! Network.

In a recent trial, a market-leading online travel company saw a 230% increase in total bookings and a 651% increase in click-through rate when comparing Enhanced Retargeting to their traditional retargeting campaign. Obviously, retargeting results depend on a number of factors, including your desired audience and your creatives.

One targeting product is specifically for Sponsored Search ads:

Enhanced Targeting, which includes ad scheduling and demographic targeting within search. The new features are designed to extend the advertiser’s control over where and when an ad is shown at both the campaign and ad group level, including what time of day and day of the week an advertiser would like campaigns to run, and what age and gender they’d like to reach (demographic). Advertisers will be able to vary their bids for different segments in order to increase their ability to reach the desired audience. We’ll talk more about these changes as we make them widely available in March.

The announcement was made today as part of Yahoo!’s keynote presentation at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual conference. “Marketers are looking for increased accountability for every dollar they spend,” says Michael Walrath, our senior vice president in the Advertising Marketplaces Group. “Yahoo!’s new targeting products significantly improve the ability for search and display advertisers to reach their target audience, providing increased efficiency and accountability.”

For more details on these exciting offerings, please see today’s press release.

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