Help With Minimum Bids

Attend our pricing change webinar

Are you still unclear about how the way our minimum bids are now set for Sponsored Search? A free webinar for our advertisers on Thursday, May 29, will help you understand the change.

Sponsored Search keywords can now be lower or higher than $.10, depending on value and quality of that term. The webinar session is designed to tell you everything you need to know about the pricing change, so that you can maintain the performance of your Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns, or even take advantage of the new minimums to help improve performance.

The webinar will:

• Walk you through the changes associated with the pricing update
• Provide an overview of new account features and functionality
• Share best practices for keyword and ad quality management
• Present sample scenarios of how your account might be affected
• Offer best practices for working with minimum bids

Yahoo! Search Marketing staff will be available during each webinar to answer your questions.  

To register:

Click here to go to the webinar registration pages. First-time webinar registrants will need to create a password of between 4 and 32 characters. If you are unable to attend either webinar, please visit the Help Center to view an archive of the webinar.

–The Team

The Top of the Page

How to Reach Today’s Demanding Searcher

News Flash: The expectations of search engine users are up. And their patience? Down!

But is this truly news to you? I doubt it. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that these measures have been trending this way for some time now.

However, what may be new info is that such user behavior and attitudes have important implications for marketers. Before we begin our discussion of how you can capitalize on what your users think and do, take a look at the findings from an April 2008 study conducted by JupiterResearch, as it illustrates these trends:

So what are the implications of these findings?

There’s an obvious need to optimize your Web pages and obtain links from credible, relevant sources to maximize the chance of your site to be found on the first few pages of search results. But there are also two other important implications.

Low-Hanging Fruit
First, by using and optimizing all of the assets in your digital library, such as images, videos, audio files and press releases, you can gain a competitive advantage. Seek out these assets within other areas of your company, and if they are appropriate to use, place them on your website and support them with other relevant content.

But don’t stop there. Take these same assets and find resource sites (e.g., YouTube) and social media sites (e.g., Facebook) to post and tag them, so that you can expose your brand to visitors of those sites who may otherwise have never visited your corporate website.

This step is especially important now that all of the major search engines show more than just text in their search results, in what we call “blended results.” Now, such digital assets—on your website or elsewhere—have the potential to supplant your competitors’ listings on the search results pages for your most important keywords. And performing these steps with all your digital assets in a holistic manner will help your brand to dominate the search results page.

Pay for Play
The second implication is that barring the ability for you to effectively compete with other organic (algorithmic) search results—either with your Web pages or the digital assets just discussed—implementing some new paid search strategies can help obtain a greater presence for your brand within top search results. The questions from the study were specific neither to organic nor paid search results, so search engine users are looking at both types of results prior to making their “click or re-launch” decision.

In organic search results you may be competing with competitors that have several years’ head start, thousands of pages of optimized content, thousands of incoming links, and thousands of digital assets that they’ve distributed all over the Internet. But paid search (like Yahoo! Sponsored Search), using compelling ads and strong calls to action, can be used as a great equalizer to overcome any advantages they have in the algorithmic results.

Clearly, users’ expectations continue to rise, and their patience continues to wane. Smart marketers will capitalize on these trends by showcasing their digital assets, and initiating paid search campaigns to help their companies into the first few pages of results.

— Robert J. Murray, President, iProspect

Robert J. Murray is president of search engine marketing firm iProspect in Watertown, Massachusetts, and can be reached at rob.murray@iprospect.com.

Making the Grade

Case study: CourseAdvisor teaches how to master the creative side of search

CourseAdvisor, an online education research directory that connects prospective students with more than 500 colleges and universities, had mastered the numbers of search marketing but hadn’t leveraged the creative side of search. With help from Yahoo!, CourseAdvisor wrote new ads and restructured its account—and saw its clicks go up 44% during a five-month period.

As a technology-focused company, CourseAdvisor constantly monitored its site traffic and conversion rates. The company was consumed with the technical side of the business, but other elements of its search campaigns suffered. CourseAdvisor needed help balancing the creative and technical sides of search.

“We were taking advantage of the data-driven side of search, but felt we still had great potential on the creative side,” said Addie Conner, Director of Search Marketing at CourseAdvisor. For instance, they typically had just one creative per ad group, which contained large numbers of keywords. CourseAdvisor communicated its needs to Yahoo!, which quickly took action.

About CourseAdvisor
CourseAdvisor matches students’ skills and education needs to degree and certificate programs, serving over 5 million unique visitors per month. Founded in 2004 by a group of MIT and UMass/Amherst college alumni and entrepreneurs, CourseAdvisor applies modern database marketing practices to the academic enrollment cycle. Its primary marketing objective is lead generation; 95% of CourseAdvisor’s business is driven by search marketing. 

Creative Counseling
In order to fully optimize creative, CourseAdvisor first needed to restructure its account. A Yahoo! account team member worked directly with CourseAdvisor to help reorganize its huge list of keywords; CourseAdvisor has hundreds of thousands of keywords in its account. The keywords were reorganized into topical ad groups that allowed creatives to be more relevant; that should help improve the account over time by garnering high quality scores.

Then the team turned its attention to the ad creative, beginning with adding alternative ad titles. They looked at the way keyword phrases were worded in alt text, for example, changing “Degree nursing online” to “Online Nursing Degree.” This change in wording is more readable for the user and a better representation of the brand.

Through daily follow-up phone calls, the Yahoo! Search Marketing team was highly engaged with CourseAdvisor’s search campaign.

“You get a real sense of caring from the Yahoo! team, who go above and beyond to help us out. They have a willingness to learn and grow with our business. We’re reaching a high-quality audience with a high conversion rate,” Conner said.

Results

• CourseAdvisor enjoyed a 44% increase in clicks during a five-month period.
• Due to high quality traffic on Yahoo!, the company’s Yahoo! Search Marketing campaign achieved a higher conversion rate than its campaigns with other search engines.
• CourseAdvisor was able to organize its high volume of keywords into tight, efficient ad groups.
• With better creatives, CourseAdvisor is more likely to show the right ad message to the right customer.

Better? You Bet

A bunch of enhancements have just been installed in Sponsored Search

“It’s the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.”

— Legendary basketball coach John R. Wooden

Things continue to be busy here at Yahoo!, and not just because of any on-again/off-again courtship by a company from a rainy land. Here at Burbank HQ, our engineers continue with their regular schedule of tinkering with and improving Sponsored Search to make it more intuitive, and to ultimately give advertisers more bang for the buck.

Our latest enhancements aren’t going to make worldwide headlines, but they can help you do things like see at a glance which campaigns, ad groups and keywords are offline—and why. Here’s what you might notice the next time you log in:

• All names of objects (campaign, ad group, keyword, etc.) that are offline are displayed with red text for easy recognition.
• The “Top Campaigns” and “Watched Campaigns” tables on the Dashboard page now include a “Status” column to help you identify if and why any campaigns are offline.
• Minor updates to the “Campaigns” page have been made, including a new “Status” column, the ability to filter by “Status” when using the Advanced Search function, and replacing the “Campaign On/Off” button with individual “Pause” and “Unpause” buttons.
• We made minor tweaks to the Ads table on an Ad Group page, including adding a “Status” column, and replacing the “Campaign On/Off” button with individual “Pause” and “Unpause” buttons.
• New status settings have been added on the Search page, under the Campaigns tab.
• The addition of the “Status” column to the Ad Group, Ad and Keyword Search screens under the Campaigns tab.
• The ability to export (using the “Download” button) account information has been added to account-level Ad Group and Keyword pages, under the Campaigns tab.

Here’s wishing you achieve “big things” with your online business.

— Jeff Hecox

Photo courtesy WoodenCourse.com.

Writing Effective Ads

Find the message that clicks with customers

This is an abridged excerpt from the Smart Start guide, which is packed with helpful content to assist you in making your campaigns as effective as possible. Whether you’re an expert search marketer or just starting out, these tips from Yahoo!’s Sharon Goodsense offer practical search marketing insights. Download Smart Start.

When creating ads, there are several things you can do to help get more clicks.

Write the best ad text you can

• Be precise in describing what you offer. Ads that are not well written or are unclear do not perform well.
• Make your ads concise and factual. Ads that are too salesy might repel, not attract.
• Don’t use ampersands (&) and numbers in place of words. These symbols can make your ad look unprofessional.
• Provide a strong call-to-action. If your business provides something unique, make sure to include that in your ad.

Use the insert keyword feature

You probably wouldn’t click an ad that didn’t mention what you were searching for—and neither will your customers. Research shows that people are more likely to click if the keyword appears in the ad’s title or description. To use the feature, click the insert keyword link at the place in your ad’s title or description where you would like your keyword to appear. When a prospective customer searches for one of your keywords, the system will insert the appropriate keyword into your title or description in bold type—reassuring searchers that your ad matches their search.

Make sure your landing page is consistent with your ad

If you send searchers to a web page that doesn’t include what they searched for, this makes for a bad customer experience, which can have a negative impact on your conversion rate. For best results, focus on the customer, not your company.

Use ad testing

Testing ad messages is the mark of a smart advertiser—so we make it easy for you to do just that! If you can write an ad, you can use ad testing. All you need to do is create more than one ad in an ad group. Each of the ads that you created will be rotated in search results when searchers type in keywords from that ad group.

If you choose to use ad testing, the ad receiving the highest click-through rate will be shown more often in search results over time. This is because ad optimization is turned on in your account. (You can also set up ad optimization to show ads more frequently for other metrics, such as conversions or revenue.) If you prefer, you can also turn ad optimization off. But if you leave ad optimization on, you could see even more clicks to your web site, because your better ads will be shown more often. Eventually, this could improve your ad quality, which can improve your ad’s rank in search results. All steps in the right direction!

— The Smart Start guide

Green Clicks

How to “Green” Your Search Marketing

There’s no question that the environment is one of today’s “hot topics,” pun intended. Many consumers are now searching for ways to lower their carbon footprint, and creating a demand for eco-friendly products and services. It’s a new marketplace that is ripe for the picking for savvy marketers.

Do you offer a collection of green products but don’t know how to capture this new growing audience? Or are you an established green brand in fear of how to cope with an influx of competition? I spoke with a few of our customer solutions and content development representatives to get advice on structuring a campaign that shows your environmentally-friendly side.

Newcomers to the Green Market

1. Think Like a User

Environmentally-concerned consumers often look at every claim, ingredient listing and line of ad copy created by a product manufacturer or service provider to determine, “How might using this product or service hurt the environment?” So make sure you highlight your “greenularity” in your ad copy. For example, if you are a dry cleaner who uses non-toxic cleansers, include that fact in your ad, as it will set you apart from competitors.

2. Plant Seasonal Seeds

Green awareness isn’t just for Earth Day. Many folks purchase eco-friendly products at every gift-buying occasion, so go after them! You can create a green campaign for Mother’s Day, Graduation season, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, etc., just as you would for general seasonal campaigns.

3. Think Locally

We’ve all heard of the concept of “Think globally, act locally,” so consider adding campaigns specifically targeted at your local consumers. Try offering discounts to those in your nearby community to support the reduction of carbons emitted through shipping and transportation. Our geo-targeting feature makes it easy to show that you are aligned with green thinking in this way.

4. Land on Your Feet

If you’re running a green ad, make sure your landing page is green, as well. After all, you don’t want an environmentalist to click on your ad, go to your site, then see that you’re pushing a product that goes against their beliefs. But be careful: Green shoppers tend to be suspect of companies who try to “green-wash” their brand with shallow marketing ploys. If possible, add content on your site that shows what your company is doing to help the globe. You can even post news items on environmental concerns that relate to your products.

5. Up-Selling and Cross-Selling

If you offer several eco-friendly products, cross-sell them when a customer is purchasing one, and display them all on one special page. Green or not, users love one-stop shopping: If you’re selling someone an aluminum reusable water bottle and you’re not promoting your biodegradable disposable eating utensils, you might be missing out on a sale! A lot of people take baby steps in greening their lives—if you show them the way and tip them off to new options, you’ll make more sales and earn their loyalty, as well.

“But I Was Here First!”

While you may have been branding your company as eco-friendly long before being green became trendy, staying on top of the flood of new products entering this marketplace can be a challenge. We offer two suggestions:

1. Stress Your Credibility

If you really have been eco-friendly for years, tell your customers. Longevity in Earth-saving earns points with greenies who may be skeptical to fly-by-night newcomers, or those who are just jumping on the green bandwagon. Write it in your ad copy, and tell your story on your landing page.

2. …and Your Credentials 

If you are a certified green company, make sure that your ad contains this info. Green consumers love to patronize a company officially labeled organic, or one that passes all the tests for greenness. Their trust in that status will earn you their loyalty.

— Kastle Waserman, Communications Manager, Customer Solutions

Photo courtesy of Thiru Murugan, via Flickr

Anti-Phishing Reminders

Defend yourself from scammers looking to steal your account

Though we have previously published articles on “phishing,” we think it never hurts to remind you of ways to protect yourself from these scammers.

You may receive an e-mail that looks like it came from Yahoo!, taking you to something that looks like a Yahoo! Search Marketing log-in page. But in reality it can be a phishing scam from somebody who is trying to duplicate our login page to get your user name and password to hijack your account.

Well, don’t fret. To help combat these phishing scams, we have installed what’s called a “sign-in seal” on our log-in page. Already in use by many financial institutions, a sign-in seal is a cookie-based secret message or image that is displayed on your computer only. (That is, the machine you use to log in to your account.) If you use more than one computer, you’ll need to set up your seal for each. You can create your own custom text message to use as a seal, or upload your own image.

If you do not see your custom seal—and you haven’t cleared your cookies on your browser—when signing into your account, the site you’re on may be a “spoof” site designed to hoodwink you into giving up your valuable personal information. We encourage you to create a customized sign-in seal for your Yahoo! Search Marketing account today, then look for it every time you log in. You can set up your seal from your Yahoo! Search Marketing log-in page (the real one).

How to Recognize a Scam Email
Phishing emails usually try to hook you with some official-sounding message about your account. A common subject line is “Please Verify Your…”. Once you open the email, you’ll often see familiar corporate colors, branding, logos and language. Sometimes they will tell you that your account has been disabled for a bogus reason. At other times, they’ll offer a “free upgrade” to a new (and often non-existent) service.

Don’t Give Out Account or Personal Info to Anyone
The biggest clue in the fake email is that it asks for your username and password. We will never send you an email asking for your password.

Another way to help tell the faux from the friendly is by looking at the sender’s email address. Most of the official communications we send you will come from an address that looks like this: solutions(at)ysm.yahoo-email.com. If you get an email from a yahoo.com address asking you for info, it’s a good bet that it’s a fake.

If you think you’ve been “phished” for info, please let us know by emailing phishing(at)cc.yahoo-inc.com, or forward the email in question to that address.

To learn more about how you can keep from getting reeled in by “phishermen,” and how to guard against other Internet-based scams, visit these resources:

• Common Abuse Issues
• Yahoo! Security Center

—The Team

Pomp and Circumstance

6 Tips for Prom and Grad Season

My prom was a long time ago, but I’ve never forgotten…all the big hair. But proms and graduations still mean a lot to young folks—and the online retailers that sell evening gowns, tuxedos and limo services for the big evening, or diploma frames, coffee mugs or other gifts for grads.

According to a 2007 survey conducted by BIGresearch on behalf of the National Retail Foundation, a third of people polled planned to purchase at least one graduation gift in 2007, with a total projected spend of $4.5 billion. Although cash was the number-one gift for graduation and prom season, other items such as gift cards, electronics and apparel were also on gift-givers’ lists last year. On average, consumers expected to spend roughly $58.50 on gifts, with parents and grandparents over the age of 45 projected to spend roughly $110.

Ready to take advantage of this springtime shopping season? Here are six helpful tips that may help you attract gift-givers and prom-goers to your ads:

1. Separate Campaigns

Advertisers who sell gift cards, as well as those who specialize in formalwear sales and rental, may want to consider creating campaigns targeted toward consumers who intend to purchase these items for their loved ones. Likewise, advertisers who sell party supplies and greeting cards should also consider separate campaigns targeted at those who are planning graduation or prom bashes.

2. Promotional language

Including deals, such as low price points, coupon codes, free shipping or free gift wrapping, generally improves an ad’s performance.

3. Keyword/creative conflict

Make sure that your titles and descriptions don’t clash with their associated keywords. Even when the keyword appears in the creative, searchers may skip the ad if the main focus appears to be on something else.

4. Keyword insertion and Alt Text

Our Keyword Insertion tool helps make sure that the user’s search term always appears in your ads, and Alt Text helps the ad appear the way you want it.

5. Customization helps

Greeting card sites that offer customizable cards should be sure to mention that in their ads, as it likely will resonate with searchers.

6. Scope of offerings

Searches using general terms shouldn’t lead to an ad for a very specific item. For example, people searching with terms like “prom dress” usually want to be able to browse a variety of styles and colors, and may not click on an ad that promotes a “red floor-length strapless prom dress.”

You may not still remember everything about your prom night or graduation, but if you remember these few important tips, you can make your ads the “class” of ‘08.

— Noah Belson, Content Quality Analyst

So Happy Together

5 ways to integrate pay-per-click search ads with online display ads

What kind of online advertising should you use: search or display? Well, if you want to drive targeted traffic to your site, build brand awareness and increase sales, you should be using both.

When you tie search ads, display ads and your landing pages together with a consistent message, the mixture can help your advertising resonate with users and drive site traffic and sales to a whole new level.

Here are five tips that you can use to integrate your Sponsored Search ads with display ads:

1. Know your target audience.
This one comes first, because knowing your target audience is the key to any form of Internet marketing. Before a penny is spent on advertising, you must ask yourself: Who do I want to target? What are their needs? Which words should I use in my ad copy to get them to click on my ad?

2. Determine the goals of Sponsored Search and banner ads.
The goals of both types of ads should ultimately be the same: attracting qualified traffic to your site. But the way each accomplishes this may differ. Generally speaking, pay-per-click ads are primarily used for generating leads and sales, and secondarily for increasing brand recognition. The majority of the time, banner ads lean toward branding and to support other search marketing strategies.

3. Write the search ads first and then expand.
When launching Sponsored Search ads and display ads at the same time, it’s generally easier to write the ad copy for the search ads first, and then use that theme to expand the banner campaign. Why? Because you’re working with a finite amount of space in the search ads. Once the search ad copy has been written, your graphic designer will have a better idea how to craft your banner ads.

4. Target your ads for the same places.
It can be very effective to get search ads and display ads displayed in the same general area of a site. For instance, if you operate a travel company in San Francisco and want to target tourists, you might launch a Sponsored Search campaign with Yahoo! Search Marketing, submit your website to Yahoo! Travel Submit, and purchase a banner ad in the Yahoo! Travel San Francisco-related section. This way, visitors can find your ads via search, read reviews in Yahoo! Travel, and see your banner ad on the same page, such as on this page.

5. Test, then test again.
With all online advertising campaigns, you should plot out your campaign at the beginning and test different ads and ad copy, offers or landing pages to achieve the highest return on your advertising investment. Be creative and don’t be afraid to try different things. Some ads that you think will be very effective might tank, while other ads you think will be worthless might take off!

– Nick Stamoulis, President of Brick Marketing and Blogger at Search Engine Optimization Journal and Pay Per Click Journal

Bullseye! photo courtesy of mfshadow via Flickr

Min Bid Changes in Your Account Interface

Find out more about the new tools that can help you manage your bids

“WIIFM,” as most people know, is not your local Lite Rock radio station, but an acronym for the question “What’s In It For Me?”. And WIIFM is what most advertisers want to know anytime we announce a new product, feature or change related to Sponsored Search.

This certainly holds true when it comes to our recent change to the way minimum bids are determined. It really boils down to How will I know if my minimum bids are changing? and Knowing that information, what should I do?.

How You’ll Know if Your Minimum Bids are Changing
A change to minimum bids is important information that you need to find easily. As a result, we’ve literally plastered it all over the account interface—you’d have to work pretty hard not to see it if you’re logged into your account.

The first place you may spot a change is on your Dashboard page. If you have one or more keywords with bids that are below a new minimum amount, you will receive a message in the Dashboard Alerts section, as well as an email. You’ll have a grace period of up to several days to adjust your bids, so that your keywords can stay active. Conversely, we’ll also send alerts when the minimum bid has dropped and your previously inactive keywords are now active.

You can find info on any below-minimum bids on our account-level keyword page, which is itself a nifty new page that lets you look at all keywords in your account, regardless of the campaign or ad group in which they reside. Bids that are either inactive or about to become inactive are highlighted in red in the “Status” column:

Similar status columns have been added to other keyword and ad group pages throughout your account. You can also search for affected keywords with an Advanced Search from a keyword or ad group page, which now lets you filter your keywords by keyword status.

OK, Now What Do I Do With this Information?
During a grace period, your ads will continue to be eligible to be displayed, and the keyword will be displayed with the status “Pending Inactive, Bid Too Low” in the account interface.

After the grace period ends, if you have not raised your bid to at least the new minimum, the keyword will be displayed with the status “Inactive, Bid Too Low” in the account interface. (You can see both of these statuses—or should that be “statii”—in the screen shot above.)

The important thing to remember here is that the only way you can make a “Pending Inactive” or “Inactive” keyword immediately active again is to raise the bid to your required minimum. Increasing the quality of the ads associated with the keyword in question can generally help lower your minimum bid, but not until we recalibrate that minimum bid. So if you don’t want your keyword to go offline at all, you should raise your bid before the grace period ends.

If you decide to increase your bid on a “Pending Inactive” keyword, the new bid takes effect immediately, and your ads become active as soon as your bid meets or exceeds your minimum bid required for that keyword.

To take the “sledge-hammer approach” to increasing your bids above the minimum, use the bulk bidding tool. You start by checking the box next to the keywords you want to adjust, and click “Set Keyword Bids”. This will take you to the page pictured below, where you can raise the selected keyword bids to a level that will meet all of the minimum bid requirements for those keywords.

But remember, with this tool you’re only raising each bid to the minimum needed to stay active, not necessarily to the price that will make you competitive for that keyword.

If you discover that your minimum bids have decreased, you can always lower your bids on those keywords, understanding that by doing so you may end up dropping position in search results and reduce your traffic from that keyword.

Higher or lower, active or inactive, you’re now able to easily see what’s going on with minimum bids in your account, and take action.

— Jeff Hecox

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