Posts filed under 'Updates & Enhancements'

Video: What’s Next for Yahoo! Search?

David Pann talks about customer migration and continuing search innovation

How will the search agreement with Microsoft affect Yahoo! advertisers and products? David Pann, VP and general manager of search advertising, told WebProNews Video that the deal is “a win for advertisers with a single buy getting access to more inventory, it’s a win for consumers for a greater relevance, and it’s a win for consumers and publishers since they have greater access to a new set of participation and inventory.” For more from David, watch the video below.

More WebProNews Videos

—The Team

Five Ways Advertisers Can Save Time

Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop simplifies multiple campaign management

If you’re an advertiser running more than one campaign, you will probably welcome the new Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop, a free offline tool that lets you spend less time on the tactical details of campaign management, and more on increasing your return-on-investment.

With Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop, it now takes just a few clicks to modify multiple campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads at the same time. And if you get carried away, you can even undo selected changes with no harm done.

Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop puts an intuitive face on five major campaign management tasks:

• Bulk editing: Easily make mass changes to settings such as status, match types and budgets within an intuitive interface; increase or decrease multiple keyword bids; and export your view of keywords, ads, ad groups and campaigns into Excel for use however you wish.
• Campaign transfer: Import your third-party campaign data in one easy step.
• Keyword research: Use our keyword suggestion engine to find and add new, relevant keywords to your campaigns; get URL-based keyword suggestions to increase your keyword relevance and improve your performance; and export the keyword suggestions into Excel to share this information or to add tracking URLs.
• Find, replace and search: Find and replace text in ads, keywords, ad groups and campaigns; search for specific campaigns, ad groups, ads, or keywords in your account; or search for information in any of the account tabs.
• Account performance statistics: Retrieve status and statistics for your account’s impressions, clicks, CTR, cost, ad quality scores and other information.

By using Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop you’ll have more time to analyze campaign performance, test your ads, and do all the other things that can help make campaigns succeed. Or, you could go do something else entirely!

Ready to get started? Download the free Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop, or register now for a webinar that will introduce you to the tool and its benefits.

–-Chris Marlowe, Staff Writer

(Stopwatch image by Casey Marshall via Flickr, CC 2.0)

New Search Improvements for the New Year

Yahoo! rings in 2010 with search advertising enhancements that deliver

Last fall, I answered the question “Does search still matter to Yahoo!” with a definitive YES.  But words only go so far, which is why Yahoo! is rolling out new search enhancements for users and advertisers.

All about control
Next week, we’ll update our Sponsored Search product with two new features aimed at giving advertisers more transparency into and control over their accounts. Our Network Distribution feature will let you run your ads on Yahoo! search pages, our partners’ sites, or both.  If you run your ads on our entire network, you can also set different bids for Yahoo! or its partners.

We’re also launching a new tool that makes it easier for you to get started with Yahoo! Search Marketing. We know there are many advertisers who use other search marketing providers such as Google Adwords, so we’ve built a feature allowing easy and efficient conversion of your AdWords campaign data into Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns. You can import your files by simply clicking the “Import Campaigns” button. We believe the ease of launching campaigns with your existing data will encourage more advertisers to use Yahoo! search. You’ll hear more about both of these new features in the coming weeks.

Our sales team has some new tools to help advertisers who work with a Yahoo! account representative, including a web-to-mobile migration tool that makes it easy to move a traditional paid search campaign to our mobile paid search platform. Another tool automatically adds relevant new long-tail keywords to a campaign as our systems show that users are now searching for them. Additionally, we know  that advertisers can add thousands of keywords/terms into their account at any given time, so we built a tool that can group them into ad groups by relevance automatically.

More relevant searches
More than 2.5 billion searches are conducted on Yahoo! monthly (comScore, November 2009), and we’re constantly tweaking our search results page to make it easier for users to find things. The more relevant our searches, the more targeted opportunities advertisers will find. Our new search results page makes it easier to sort and filter results, including shortcuts that shows up-to-the minute tweets and news links for breaking headlines.

Since not all Web information is text-based, we’ve also launched better ways to sort multimedia searches. Our video search refiner lets users explore their favorite TV shows, movies and musicians in an intuitive way. The image search refiner lets people explore celebrities and places of interest and easily find more contextual information about them.

Better results for advertisers
Are our search initiatives working? That’s what we’re hearing from our advertisers. Covario, a leader in software and services for paid and organic search management, recently reported that the cost of clicks on Yahoo! decreased for their clients by 20-25%, and as a result their clients increased spending on Yahoo! by 36.5% in the fourth quarter of last year. The Pronto Network, a leading shopping comparison site owned by IAC, increased their ROI by 5-8% after seeing a 10-15% drop in the amount they were paying for clicks, and adjusting their bids to secure the best possible placements of their ads.

Try out these new features or talk to your account manager for more information. I look forward to telling you about more search advances in the coming months—and invite you to take a closer look at us to see if Yahoo! can bring you the same kinds of results.

—David Pann, Yahoo! vice-president and general manager of search marketing

Pricing Adjustments Working, Say Experts

YSM CTRs way up, CPCs and CPAs down as compared to AdWords, according to Covario blog

The Actionable Insights blog, published by marketing analytics software maker Covario, is reporting that Yahoo! Search Marketing’s September change to the way pricing discounts are determined is having a significantly positive impact for advertisers. Blogger Craig Macdonald and team looked at Covario client data  to determine whether the launch of the new discounting was working as intended, and found that the answer was clearly “Yes.”

Macdonald reports that (looking at a four-week period before and after the discounts were enhanced) click-through rates on Yahoo! Search Marketing ads were up 46%, while only up 5% on Google AdWords ads during same time period. Covario also found that cost-per-click on Yahoo! fell by 29% during this time, while being down only 10% on Google.  Finally, Covario found that cost-per-acquisition on YSM is down a full 11% since the launch.

More details can be found at the Actionable Insights blog.

— The Team

Sponsored Ads in Filtered Search Results

What the new feature in the Yahoo! Search results page means to advertisers

We unveiled the new and improved Yahoo! search results page last month, which gives users more control over the results they see. One of the key features that was added lets users filter results by website; and starting today, your Sponsored Search ad can appear for those more relevant search results.

On our new search page, if a searcher types in a phrase such as “buy pink floyd”, he can further refine his search results by clicking on links on the left-hand side of the page, which include sites that users often find useful. If the user clicks on one of the suggested sites, he’ll get a smaller set of results from that domain only.

Now, if the user selects a site that is also a Sponsored Search advertiser, that advertiser’s ad should still be displayed in the new set of results. For example:

• The user types “buy pink floyd” in a search box.
• A set of results is displayed, containing both web listings and multiple paid ads.
• The searcher clicks on “Amazon.com” in the left-hand column to filter the results.
• The results page resets, and now displays web and paid results from Amazon.com only.

As always, you’ll only pay if the user clicks on your ad, and the single ad that may be displayed in filtered results will be selected based on its relevancy to the search query.

What does this mean for advertisers?
All advertisers will still get the same chances at clicks before any filtering takes place. But those advertisers whose sites show up as a filtering option will get further opportunities for clicks when their ad shows up in the narrowed results—without any competing ads. And the ads may be more relevant to consumers, as our systems take the user’s choice into account.

(FYI, the domains our system uses to filter results are chosen based on a number of factors, such as their listings’ quality, popularity and user response.)

The filtering option, along with the other cool features added to Yahoo! Search last month, is designed to increase relevancy and user control of the search experience. And when results are more relevant to consumers, that can translate to a better return for advertisers.

— Jeff Hecox

The Next Wave of Search

Yahoo! Search Advertising Enhancements That Deliver

With all of the events that Yahoo! has gone through in the last several months, one of the questions I get is: “Does Yahoo! still care about search?” The answer is: Absolutely. In fact, Yahoo! is delivering a series of enhancements that deliver value to consumers and advertisers alike.

Our new search enhancements fall into four major areas: innovation, transparency and control, value, and consumer relevance.

Innovation
Only Yahoo! can combine the power of search and display to provide great value to our advertisers. Our search retargeting and Rich Ads in Search products are great examples of just that. Our initial testing suggests that Rich Ads in Search can help improve click-through rate by as much as 25%, and some advertisers have even more impressive results.

Later this month, we’ll build on the success of Rich Ads in Search and let some of our large brand advertisers bid for Rich Ads placement and pay by the click. Those advertisers will be able to manage Rich Ads and their budgeting, targeting and reporting directly from the Sponsored Search interface and our APIs.

We are also delivering enhancements our BOSS search program. With 30 million queries a day, we will soon let third-party developers syndicate Yahoo! search on their sites and earn a share of the revenue from it.

Transparency and Control
You want to be in control of your ad campaigns. You want to know where your ads are showing, and you want better tools to manage them. That is why we just rolled out the Ad Delivery Report, which lets you see where your ads are showing on our various partner sites and how their traffic is performing for you. You can use our Blocked Domains feature to block sites that aren’t working for you.

You’ll have even more powerful tools to control where your ads show with Network Distribution. Network Distribution will let you run your ads on either Yahoo! or its partner network, and set bids separately for each channel. We expect to launch Network Distribution in the first quarter of next year.

Also next year, you’ll be able to get a look at our Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop tool, an offline tool designed to help sophisticated search advertisers create and manage large campaigns. The tool will help you complete search advertising tasks easier and more quickly. If you’re interested in it now, please contact your account representative or sign up  to inquire about our beta program.

Value
We know it’s all about value and results so we want you to get the most out of your investment. That is why we recently adjusted our pricing model to better align what you pay with the value of the clicks you receive. And we keep going. Later this year, you’ll see enhancements to our ad selection technology that are designed to improve the way ads get matched to consumer queries. Better matching means better results, and should lead to better return for you.

Consumer relevance
More personally relevant searches translate into more qualified leads for advertisers. Our new search results page gives users tools to discover new information, explore related concepts, and filter search results by specific sites and types of content such as people, videos and discussion forums.

We are also creating search that learns. Using search science that detects user intent by studying search behavior over time, our search technology is designed to better understand what people are searching for by looking at their previous searches.

If you haven’t noticed, our new marketing campaign puts the consumer at the center of everything Yahoo! does, and we’re backing that up by investing heavily in the consumer experience. Our success is tied to attracting more engaged consumers who, in turn, search more frequently. And that’s good news for you.

—David Pann, Yahoo! vice-president and general manager of search marketing

Mobile Reach for Your Ads

Your Yahoo! Sponsored Search ads now appear on iPhones and Androids

You’ve probably noticed that for a lot of consumers, surfing the Web increasingly doesn’t depend upon the PC. That’s why, as of today, we’ve tweaked our Yahoo! Sponsored Search system to serve your ads to iPhone (all models, including iTouch) and Android mobile phones.
 
The coolest part is you don’t have to do anything to expand the reach of your ads. We’ve done it for you. As of today, your ads should begin appearing immediately on these devices for relevant searches, if they have not already.

With this tweak, standard Sponsored Search ads (40-character header, 70-character description, the host URL—you know the drill) will appear on these mobile devices, giving your ads wider appeal and more relevancy to people on the go—potential customers searching for your offerings, whether you’re offering dry cleaning or a dry martini.

Of course, you can still specifiically target mobile users with Yahoo! Mobile Sponsored Search.

This upgrade goes part and parcel with our recent efforts to provide better experiences to mobile users and advertisers. And they’ve gotten rave reviews across the wireless information superhighway. Check out these reviews from The New York Times (Yahoo! Fantasy Football), ABC News TechBytes (Flickr’s new mobile app), and this audio interview with our senior director of mobile applications, Sandeep Gupta, on The Boot Camp Report.

But, please, no “there’s an app for that” jokes.

— The Team

Do You Know Where Your Ads Are?

New feature helps you see how your traffic performs

Would you like to know where your ads are running? Yahoo! is launching some new features that will let you know which Yahoo! partners are providing you traffic, and charge you according to the performance of the traffic you receive.

There you are
You probably know that your ads can appear not only on Yahoo, but on partners throughout our distribution network, and that you can block them if they’re not performing for you. But until now, if you didn’t have a pretty good head for web measurement stuff, you probably didn’t know which traffic sources were working for you. Now our Ad Delivery Report will let you see how your ads are performing on various partners, and use that information to block the partners who don’t give you what you need.

The Ad Delivery Report shows you not only your traffic sources—whether that be Yahoo! or some of our partners—but also how your traffic from those sources converts. Combined with one of our analytics options, you can track measurements such as impressions, click-throughs, conversions and return on ad spend. You can also filter the results by account, domain, distribution channel and tactic.

If you find traffic sources that you don’t want, you can enter the domains in our Blocked Domains tool. Keep in mind that you can block a maximum of 500 domains, so pick the domains that are most important for you to block based on the amount and performance of traffic. Make sure you’re getting enough traffic on those domains to make informed decisions about their performance, and keep in mind that when you block domains you reduce the traffic you’re likely to receive, too.

You can get started with the Ad Delivery Report by clicking on the “Reports” tab in the Sponsored Search interface, or learn more about how to use it in our help center.

Pay for what you get
As you’ll see when you start looking at your Ad Delivery Report, not every partner will perform the same for you. We’ve discounted our click charges accordingly for some time now. We’re now expanding the adjustments we make to our click charges based on our assessment of the performance of traffic coming from sources within our distribution network.

This will include deeper discounts on click charges for lower-performing traffic, and potential premiums on click charges for higher-performing traffic—in other words, your click charges will be more closely aligned to the performance of the traffic you receive.

How does it affect you? Based on our analysis, we expect that most advertisers will see click charges drop or remain unchanged, while a small fraction of advertisers may experience an increase in click charges. These adjustments are based on the performance of the traffic source, and won’t be affected by the quality of your ads. And, as always, you will never pay more for a click than the amount you set as your bid.

Now in a town near you
Sponsored Search has several new features that let you manage your billing and account information more easily. You can now edit your payment methods more simply, such as when you want to swap a credit card out for another, and more easily set an appropriate automatic charge amount  to fund your account when your balance gets low. If you’ve just signed up with us using a promotional code, the system will let you see which credits are being applied to your account, along with their status. For more details about these changes, see what’s new in Sponsored Search.

We’ve also updated our geographic targeting feature. It already let you get specific in your campaigns by allowing targeting down to the city or ZIP code levels, and it’s now even more specific with the addition of 746 new cities. So, if you were dying to target the good folks of Beverly Hills, Calif. or San Benito, Texas, today is your lucky day.

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

A Step in the Right Direction

Enhancements to targeting features help advertisers get more relevant traffic from Content Match

I’m on the email list of a national shoe retailer from which I’ve bought product, both online and in their brick-and-mortar stores. This company’s customer emails are lively and interesting, and they use some clever gimmicks to grab your attention, such as a “shoe horoscope.”

But there’s a problem, and it’s a big one: Although the good folks at this shoe seller know that I’m a guy—both from my sign-up info and my purchase history—they continually send me emails that are clearly targeted toward women. As a marketer, I’m fascinated by their messages. But as a customer, their poor targeting leaves me cold.

A miss is as good as a mile
Precise targeting is vital when you’re marketing your products, both to prospects and current customers. And when it comes to online marketing, the data available to advertisers and ad providers such as Yahoo! means that you can get it right.

Back in March, we launched several new targeting features that can help you reach more of the audience you want at the right time, right place…and at the right price. These enhancements can be used with both the Sponsored Search and Content Match distribution tactics, but one could argue that they’re of greater value to your content campaigns. After all, when someone searches for your product, your odds are pretty decent that they’ll be interested in a well-written, relevant ad.

Content Match ads don’t necessarily have that direct connection to searches, so our systems try to match page content or other relevant data to serve the most relevant ads. Recent enhancements have made this matching more accurate, and we continue to make improvements, like looking at recent user activity and search queries to find out what users may want to see.

You can do a lot yourself to refine customer targeting by taking advantage of our targeting features. If you want to 1) segment and tailor marketing messages to your most valuable audiences, 2) gain more control over your marketing dollars, 3) monitor and price your campaigns with more visibility through enhanced reporting and forecasting, and 4) get a better return on your advertising spend, take the time to learn about and experiment with these new features:

Demographic targeting: Select your desired audiences on Yahoo! sites by age and gender, and automatically adjust your bids when we find a match for your targeting preferences. Demographic targeting lets you take advantage of Yahoo!’s wide user base and deep understanding of our audience. It uses a bid adjustment model, so you can you specify a premium bid amount for desired audience segments, without losing other traffic volume.

Ad scheduling (dayparting): If the people you most want to reach are only online at certain times of the day, or your business is only open during certain hours, you can select the time of day and day of the week during which you’d like your campaigns to run. This lets you schedule ads to be shown according to users’ time zones or your account’s time zone. Ad scheduling can be applied at the campaign or ad group level.

ZIP code-level geo-targeting: This gives you more control over how geo-targeting is used in your campaigns. You can mix and match geo-targeting settings at different levels within the same campaign or ad group. Our dynamic mapping features help you select individual ZIP codes and ZIP codes surrounding them.

This short tutorial will explain in greater detail how each targeting feature works, and where to find it in your account interface. If you’ve got your sneakers on, walk on over and have a look.

— Jeff Hecox

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

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