Posts filed under 'Updates & Enhancements'

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New Dashboard Button for Deleting Alerts

From time to time we send alerts to your Dashboard, usually having to do with some issue or other regarding your account. Your most recent alerts appear in reverse chronological order (i.e., newest alert first) in the box on the upper left of your dashboard homepage.

Previously, you could only delete alerts from the View All alerts screen. But now, you can delete an alert right from your dashboard home page, simply by clicking on the little trash can icon to the right of it.

It’s modest little improvement, but one our advertisers have asked for.

—The Team

New Payment Option and a Special Offer

Secure, flexible online payments with PayPal

In addition to the myriad enhancements announced last week, your account now includes PayPal as a secure, flexible online payment option. You can now pay your Yahoo! Search Marketing bill via PayPal.

If you’re an online retailer, you probably already use PayPal to offer as a method of payment for your customers. In that case, you now have the ability to move funds directly from your existing PayPal account to pay for your search marketing budget, saving you time.

You can opt in to PayPal from the Admistration tab of your secure administration interface.

In addition, Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers who are also online retailers may be eligible to take advantage of zero PayPal Express Checkout fees through May, 2008 and (drum-roll, please) a $100 credit toward their Yahoo! Search Marketing accounts. Click here to learn more.

—The Team

Enhanced Tools and New Options

Write Ads Right(er)

Let’s admit it: Writing has gotten a whole lot easier in the last couple of millennia or so. I mean, would you write at all if you had to scratch out marks on a clay tablet with a wooden stylus? Fill your quill with ink from an ink pot every two lines? Or type so that every single letter is indelibly imprinted on each page, forcing you to correct using (gasp!) White Out?

I don’t know about you, but before computers, I may have had the urge to write, but rarely had I the fortitude. (Okay, so I’m not William Faulkner. So sue me.)

Thankfully, technology continues to take the drudgery out of writing, even out of writing ads for your Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns. You can now create, edit, copy, delete and view all saved ads (up to 20) for an ad group in one place. More importantly, you can view the performance of your ads against one another with one click.

Still getting writer’s block? A recently released feature lets you view examples of ads by other advertisers using selected keywords, which we’ve enhanced for better usability. There’s also a handy best practices cheat sheet, right in the interface.

You’ll also notice that once you create a new ad you’ll be prompted to create another one. Creating a second (or third or forth) ad activates ad testing, which lets you compare how ads in a specific ad group are performing against one another in order to help you improve your quality index score. To learn more about ad testing and ad optimization, refer to our previous post. 

Quality Medicine
Feeling irritable? Anxious? Down? It could be that your Sponsored Search account is suffering from a low quality index score. Fortunately, there’s help. We’ve enhanced the system to let you know when your quality index score is down. Every 30 days we’ll check your quality index temperature and, if it’s low, we’ll send you a notice via email.

You’ll also be able to check to see if you have ads with low quality index scores under the Account Summary tab at any time.

Clicking on the number of ads with low quality index scores takes you to the new “low quality index ads alert” page, where you can view those ads by account, campaign and ad group. You can also access suggestions for improving your ad quality. For more on this feature, visit the Help section.

Custom Report Recall
Riiiiing! Hello? It’s your new custom report view that’s calling. You now have the ability to save and recall up to 45 customized report views per account user for later reuse. Simply create a custom report view, save the configuration and your report will be saved in a drop-down menu so you can access it in the future. Want to see a specific report view each time you select a certain report type? Along with being able to “redial” a specific report, you can set a default report view to display each time you select the report type.

—Michael Mattis

New Traffic Quality Center Launches

Reggie Davis, our VP of Network Quality, cuts the ribbon

To help us build the highest quality ad network possible and combat the industry-wide issue of click fraud, today we unveil our new Traffic Quality Center. At the Traffic Quality Center, you will be able to:

• Learn how to submit a click investigation request
• Get the latest news on traffic quality
• Access tips and tools that can help you detect click fraud
• Read articles on best practices to help protect your search marketing investment

In addition, you will also find industry articles that shed light on traffic quality issues from many different perspectives.

Our commitment to traffic quality is not new. In fact, since 1998, our Click Protection System has been up and running 24/7 with the goal of filtering out bad clicks—helping to ensure that you’re only billed for the clicks that count. Like all such systems, it continues to evolve with the marketplace.

I hope you’ll take advantage of this valuable new resource and work with us toward our common goals.

—Reggie Davis, VP, Network Quality

Photo Credit: dcfox, via Flickr

Help Gets Help

A makeover for the Help Center

They say beauty’s in the eye of the search marketer. OK, maybe they don’t. But that’s not to say you don’t have your sensitive, aesthetic side. And we’d like to think that we’re sensitive to all of your needs, not just your arithmetical ones (you know, CPC, CTR, CPA, CPM and all that).

That’s why we took the Help Center down to the local beauty parlor for a makeover. Now it’s a little, shall we say, easier on the eyes.

You can swoon over it here.

New Analytics, Calendar Features

The further adventures of the Starship “Panama”

When I said before that it’s a busy time for Yahoo Search Marketing I wasn’t kidding. The updates and enhancements are coming fast and furious. And we’re just gettin’ started.

Assist Assistance
First up, we’re offering a new feature, Conversion Analytics to help you track your conversion assists. Conversions, you’ll recall, are noted in a column on your dashboard and in your various reports. A “conversion” occurs when an action you value, such as a purchase, registration, or sign-up, is completed by a user. A conversion assist occurs when a keyword has contributed to a conversion that was credited to a different keyword.

Let’s say that a user came to your Sci-Fi collectibles site and bought a “tribble” plush toy. He or she might actually have been searching on “United Federation of Planets” or “quadro-triticalé”—the genetically engineered grain that everyone knows tribbles love to munch. The user might have viewed the ad with the keyword, “United Federation of Planets” first, then later viewed the ad with the keyword, “quadro-triticalé” and then finally converted on the ad displaying the keyword, “tribble.” The system records this trail of clicks, or “lead events,” crediting both “United Federation of Planets” and “quadro-triticalé” with an assist and “tribble” with the conversion. This way you’ll know that your keywords are leading to conversions, even if the relationship is not a direct one.

The system will show up to 30 lead events per conversion over 45 days. Please note lead events will only be recorded when the user has cookies enabled.

Conversion assists are shown on your Campaigns pages, in a new column next to “Conversions,” as well as in your various reports—basically everywhere you see “Conversions” and other advanced analytics data.

Note that you must have conversion tags installed on your site in order to take advantage of this new feature. You can get these tags, and instructions on how to install them, here.

For more info, visit our Help Section.

Save the Date
We’ve also updated the calendar function to provide performance data for both custom and pre-selected date ranges in an easier-to-read format.

Short Descriptions Rolling Out today
Lastly, as we announced last week, we begin rolling out the short description requirement across the network today. That means that, starting today, all new or modified ads must include a short description (70 characters or fewer). Note that if a short description is not provided by late-June 2007—exact date to be determined—we’ll automatically cut off your ad description at the nearest complete word before 70 characters followed by an ellipsis, when it is displayed on Yahoo!

We believe that tighter, more concise ads perform better and can help improve your ads quality score in the long run. So we think it is well worth the effort.

Expect more updates and enhancements at warp speed.

—Michael Mattis

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