If you are like most pay-per-click managers, your YSM account is probably a cloned export of your Google AdWords account (excluding the content network campaigns of course). Assuming your AdWords account has a strong structure, duplication across search engines is still a good practice. However, with Yahoo’s new features, can take your campaigns to the next level. It is time to revisit your Yahoo campaign structure to get the most out of the network distribution features.

How the Search Partner Network Works
First things first, Yahoo! Search Partners and Content Match are two completely different animals and it is important that you don’t confuse the two. Yahoo’s content match displays ads based on specific web page content, geographic location and/or user profile. As cautioned in the past, the content match can spend a lot of money quickly. If you are running a lead-based campaign, watch your ROI very closely.

The Yahoo! Search Partners is a network of larger websites that have partnered with Yahoo, including Ebay.com, MSNBC, and USA Today.com. If you enable Search Partners with your pay-per-click account, then your ads will appear on these websites.

How to Structure Your Campaigns

1. Maintain Focused Campaigns/Ad Groups. Factors used to determine your account quality index in Yahoo have not changed.  It is still important to structure your campaigns and ad groups into highly focused content silos. This will enable you to write highly targeted ad text and drive traffic to highly relevant landing pages. In turn, your click-through rates will increase and your quality index will be stronger. If your Yahoo pay-per-click account is a mess, I strongly recommend a restructure before moving on to #2.
2. Separate Yahoo! Search and Search Partners. Yahoo now allows you to control your keyword bids on their search partner network. Performance varies greatly across Yahoo Search and Search Partners. By separating the distribution networks into different campaigns, you will have greater control over bids, allowing you to better maximize ROI.

   To target each network in a separate campaign, simply duplicate your campaigns in the Yahoo interface and set one to target Yahoo! Search and the other to Search Partners. Check out my post from last week to find Yahoo’s network distribution campaign settings.  To help with account management, I strongly recommending modifying the campaign names to include a network targeting qualifier (i.e. Example Campaign – Search and Example Campaign – Partners).

3. Duplicate Your Campaigns. Thankfully Yahoo now makes it easy for pay-per-click managers to separate Search and Search Partners. Using the “Import Campaigns” function, you can now easily import duplicate campaigns into Yahoo. Just follow these instructions.

Step 1: Export the campaign you choose to duplicate from the Yahoo campaigns tab. Save to your desktop.
Step 2: Go to the “Import” section within your Yahoo account
Step 3: Select your file to upload.
Step 4: From the Duplicate Campaigns dropdown menu, select Create a new campaign. This will create duplicate of the campaign, but it will change the name to Example Campaign (copy001). Since there is a current campaign running, the default will set the new campaign to pause.
Step 5: Change your network distribution settings for the existing and duplicated campaign.
Step 6: Add “Search” or “Partner” qualifiers to the campaign names.
Step 7: Activate the duplicated campaign.

How to Optimize Your Campaigns
Yahoo launched more advanced features to provide more transparency and better management of Search Partner network performance. Use the following features to optimize your newly structured search partner campaigns:

1. Distribution Quality Report – Use this report to determine your account performance within the entire network, search only, or search partners. This report is very useful in determining whither or not to continue running on the search partner network.
2. Ad Delivery Report – This report shows specific domains performance (including corresponding conversion metrics) for sites your ads run on within the Yahoo Search Partners. Use this report to identify sites that do not translate into conversions. Since new sites can appear every day, I recommend checking this report once a week to stay on top of high cost, low-converting sites.
3. Blocked Domains – This feature can by found within your account “Administration” tab. Add low-performing sites identified within the Ad Delivery Report to your campaign exclusions. Yahoo allows up to 500 blocked domains, so use ‘em if you got ‘em!

What is your experience with Yahoo’s network distribution features? Post your thoughts, learnings and/or experiences in the comments below.

Depending on your distribution settings, you now have different levels of control over keyword bids.  For the search network, you have control over individual keywords bids regardless of your targeting settings. If you have search and search partners running in the same campaign/ad group, search partner bids can be managed at the ad group or campaign level as a percentage of the search network keyword bid. For campaigns/ad groups that only target search partners, then bids can now be managed at the keyword level. It can be hard to keep your bidding opportunities straight, so below is a breakdown of the targeting options for each network:

Finding Your Network Settings

The search network settings can be set at either the campaign or ad group level. To setup your search settings, click on “Campaign Settings” and select either the campaign or ad group level.

Once you have chosen to target at the campaign or ad group level, select “Edit” under the “Network Distribution” section.

From here you can select to target the entire network, Yahoo! Search, or Yahoo! Partners. If you select to target the entire network, you can now adjust your Yahoo! Partners bid at the ad group/campaign level based on your minimum cost per click set within the search network.

Along with these distribution improvements, Yahoo also expanded its reporting functions to give advertisers a more transparent view of network performance. To learn more about the new reporting functions, check out Amber’s breakdown of the new Yahoo! Search Network reporting features.

Yahoo’s new distribution settings carry heavy implications on how to structure your search marketing campaign. Check back next week for new best practices to structure your Yahoo! account to maximize the benefits of the distribution settings.

There have been some new advances made in the Yahoo Network (finally!) that may help decrease spend on non-converting domains and increase conversions are high converting domains, as well as optimize your bids on the Yahoo network or partner networks.

1. Yahoo launches distribution quality report. This report can be found in the reports tab, at the bottom of the reports list.

The distribution report allows you to see all data (clicks, impressions, spend and conversions) broken out by Yahoo! O&O (yahoo owned and operated – all yahoo branded sites) and the partner network.

This report allows you to determine whether you can afford to advertise on Yahoos! Entire network or just yahoo search only or yahoo partners only depending on your traffic and conversion rates.

If you find that you no longer want to advertise on the Yahoo O&O or Yahoo search partners you can adjust your settings so you’re only advertising on one or the other, as well as adjust bids on one or the other.

To change your settings, click on a campaign, then click on campaign settings. Under the network distribution area on the right, click edit. This will allow you to choose which network you wish to advertise on. You can also adjust your bid plus or minus a percentage of your set maximum bid on the yahoo partner sites only at this time.

2. You can also run an ‘ad delivery report’ in the reports tab under Traffic Quality Reports.  This report shows you specific domains you’re ads are being served on via the Content Network or Yahoo’s search network. If you find there are several domains that are driving up your traffic and spend but not converting, you can easily block these domains.

To block certain domains, you can go to the admin tab, under the account general information there is an area for ‘blocked domains’ (right under blocked continents).  Here you have the option to submit up to 500 domains to be blocked from serving your ads.

If you find that you are exceeding the 500 limit of blocked domains, you can send your domains to your Yahoo rep and they can remove domains that they no longer advertise on any longer, so you can remove those domains and add in others.

My Yahoo rep says though a great way to prevent your ads from showing on certain unqualified sites is to keep track of your negative keyword lists. Negative keywords allow you to not show up for searches that contain that keyword. For example, if you’re offering bridal magazines, you may want to add in the keyword, ‘free’ assuming your magazines are not free. This will prevent your ad from showing if someone types in the keyword, ‘free bridal magazines’.

Another great addition to Yahoo is they have expanded their negative keyword limit from 250 to 500!  To add negative keywords you can add them in at the account level by going to the admin tab, then clicking on edit under tactic settings. Or you can add them in ad the ad group level by going to your ad group, click on ad group settings, and again click edit under tactic settings and add in your excluded keywords there.

There are a few more new Yahoo! features or enhancements that I’ll talk about later this week. Stay tuned!

Pricegrabber is a cost-per-click program just like Google, Yahoo and MSN. However instead of creating campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads you simply upload a feed of all your ecommerce products with their relative information like price, description, shipping cost etc.

So now not only will you display your products on Pricegrabber, but they’ll display on Yahoo from the same feed.

I use shopping search engines like Pricegrabber, Shopzilla and Shopping.com for some of my ecommerce clients and love them.  As long as you have access to a database export of your products then it’s really easy to get an account and start advertising.  Online shoppers are known to comparison shop before making their final purchases, and that’s exactly what Pricegrabber does. You type in a keyword or phrase of the item you’re looking for, and Pricegrabber will supply you with several different companies that have identical items. If there are multiple companies with the exact same item, Pricegrabber will show you the prices and shipping cost for each company allowing you to pick the best deal.

If you haven’t thought of using shopping search engines before I highly recommend you give it a try, at least for a few months. You can set your bids typically as low or high as you wish, although some categories do have minimum bid requirements.

Match types can be tricky, especially when it comes to adding negative match keywords. Negative match keywords (or keyword exclusions) are a very effective way to reduce the number of unqualified clicks on your ad. But negatives can get confusing, and often times a manager will inadvertently add a negative that prevents a targeted keyword from showing ads. To me, Google keyword match types and negative match is pretty straightforward. My confusion settles in when it comes to adding negative keywords in Yahoo.

Recently in one of my Yahoo accounts I launched a campaign with keywords targeting satellite tv terms. However, I did not want my ads show up for a broad search term like tv or satellite. Herein my question: If I add tv and satellite as negatives, will that prevent satellite tv from triggering my ad all together? Before I get to answering this question, here is a quick review of the Yahoo keyword match types. Remember that these are set at the account level within your Yahoo account.

• Standard Match: Search query trigger an ad for an exact match to a keyword. This includes singular or plural variations, and common misspellings.
• Advanced Match: Ads are triggered for a broad range of queries related to a keyword, title, description or web content. This is the default setting in Yahoo.

If you are using Standard Match in Yahoo, it is not necessary to use account exclusions. Your ads will only be served if someone enters the exact keyword you are targeting. Negative keywords (or exclusions) only apply at the account or ad group level when you have your account set to Advanced Match.

Yahoo’s negative keyword feature is not as clear-cut as Google’s negative match type system. You have to be careful of the keywords you add as negatives, because you may be preventing your ads from showing. Back to my example.

If a search query exactly matches to a keyword you are targeting, then your account-excluded keywords will not prevent your ad from showing. In my example, I am targeting satellite tv channels but have tv and satellite as a negatives. If the search query is an exact match to satellite tv channels, my ads will show.

However, a negative keyword can prevent your ads from showing when the search query just matches a keyword phrase. In the same example, I am targeting satellite tv channels and have tv and satellite as a negatives. But the search query is the phrase: best satellite tv channels. Unless I am targeting this exact phrase in my account, my keyword exclusions will prevent my ads from showing.

In this case it would be best to set negative keywords at the ad group level. The terms satellite and tv should only be added as negatives to the ad group that contains the broad satellite tv term. These negative terms are too limiting for longtail search queries like satellite tv channels and best satellite tv channels, so these ad groups do not need negative keywords.

You may have noticed the relatively new column within your Yahoo! account titled, “Targeting.” Within this column you can adjust your demographic and geographic targeting, as well as your ad scheduling preferences. Here is a quick screen shot:

Within this screen shot, the little clock emblem indicates where you can adjust your ad scheduling for each campaign.

To turn your ads completely on or off, you can adjust the times for which they show. Within the screen shot below, you can see that I have selected to run my ads from 5am-10pm on Monday through Friday, and we’re not showing ads at all on the weekends.

So, that strategy isn’t too complicated to implement. With this feature you also have the option of increasing your bids during certain times of the day. However, of course, leave it to Yahoo to only allow you the option to increase your bids, but you can’t decrease them during certain times of the day. But there is a work-around to this shortcoming.

I want to adjust my bid automatically within the screen shot below. You can see that I can either increase my bid by per a certain percentage, or I can increase it by an actual dollar. amount.

If you want to solely increase bids during certain times of the day, then you’re all set! However, if you want to have higher bids in the morning and lower bids in the evening, then you have a little bit more work ahead of you. One way to work around this limitation of only being able to increase bids is this:

1. Determine what your bids should be during your high-bid time of the day. Determine what your bids should be during your low-bid time of the day.
2. Within your campaign, set your keyword bids to the lowest price that you’d like them to be during the day.
3. Adjust your ad scheduling settings to increase your keywords to your highest bids during those high-traffic, great ROI times of the day.

With this method, you set your bids to the lowest point and then use ad scheduling to increase them automatically. This way, in a sense, you are increasing and lowering your bids to improve your performance.

Ad scheduling can be a great way to improve your PPC campaign’s performance by targeting the best time of day, while shifting focus away from those times of the day that don’t generate a great ROI. You just got to know how to work the system.

Microsoft-Yahoo partnership resources:

• You can learn more about the partnership at the  newly launched site: www.choicevalueinnovation.com
• You can follow the discussion on Twitter and keep up-to-date as news develops: Microsoft-Yahoo topic trend
• You can read a summary of the conference call held this morning: Search Engine Land summary
• Here is the official press release:

Microsoft, Yahoo! Change Search Landscape
Global Deal Creates Better Choice for Consumers and Advertisers

SUNNYVALE, CA and REDMOND, WA — 29 July, 2009 — Yahoo! and Microsoft announced an agreement that will improve the Web search experience for users and advertisers, and deliver sustained innovation to the industry. In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.

For Web users and advertisers, this deal will accelerate the pace and breadth of innovation by combining both companies’ complementary strengths and search platforms into a market competitor with the scale to fuel sustained development in search and search advertising. Users will find what they care about faster and with more personal relevance. Microsoft’s competitive search platforms will lead to more value for advertisers, better results for web publishers, and increased innovation and efficiency across the Internet.

Under this agreement, Yahoo! will focus on its core business of providing consumers with great experiences with the world’s favorite online destinations and Web products.

“This agreement comes with boatloads of value for Yahoo!, our users, and the industry. And I believe it establishes the foundation for a new era of Internet innovation and development,” said Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz. “Users will continue to experience search as a vital part of their Yahoo! experiences and will enjoy increased innovation thanks to the scale and resources this deal provides. Advertisers will also benefit from scale and enjoy greater ease of use and efficiencies working with a single platform and sales team for premium advertisers. Finally, this deal will help us increase our investments in priority areas in winning audience properties, display advertising capabilities, and mobile experiences.”

Providing a viable alternative to advertisers, this deal will combine Yahoo! and Microsoft search marketplaces so that advertisers no longer have to rely on one company that dominates more than 70 percent of all search. With the addition of Yahoo!’s search volume, Microsoft will achieve the size and scale required to unleash competition and innovation in the market, for consumers as well as advertisers.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the agreement will provide Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, the scale necessary to more effectively compete, attracting more users and advertisers, which in turn will lead to more relevant ads and search results.

“Through this agreement with Yahoo!, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers, and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company,” said Ballmer. “Success in search requires both innovation and scale. With our new Bing search platform, we’ve created breakthrough innovation and features. This agreement with Yahoo! will provide the scale we need to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness. Microsoft and Yahoo! know there’s so much more that search could be. This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search.”

“This deal fits the long-term strategic direction of Yahoo! to remain the world’s leading online media company and Carol Bartz has the full and unanimous support of the Yahoo! Board behind this deal,” said Roy Bostock, chairman, Yahoo! Inc. “This is a significant opportunity for us. Microsoft is an industry innovator in search, and it is a great opportunity for us to focus our investments in other areas critical to our future.”

The key terms of the agreement are as follows:

- The term of the agreement is 10 years;

- Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing web search platforms;
Microsoft’s Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing display advertising technology.

- Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process.

- Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force.

- Yahoo! will innovate and “own” the user experience on Yahoo! properties, including the user experience for search, even though it will be powered by Microsoft technology.

- Microsoft will compensate Yahoo! through a revenue sharing agreement on traffic generated on Yahoo!’s network of both owned and operated (O&O) and affiliate sites.

- Microsoft will pay traffic acquisition costs (TAC) to Yahoo! at an initial rate of 88% of search revenue generated on Yahoo!’s O&O sites during the first 5 years of the agreement.

- Yahoo! will continue to syndicate its existing search affiliate partnerships.

- Microsoft will guarantee Yahoo!’s O&O revenue per search (RPS) in each country for the first 18 months following initial implementation in that country.

- At full implementation (expected to occur within 24 months following regulatory approval), Yahoo! estimates, based on current levels of revenue and current operating expenses, that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual GAAP operating income of approximately $500 million and capital expenditure savings of approximately $200 million. Yahoo! also estimates that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual operating cash flow of approximately $275 million.

The agreement protects consumer privacy by limiting the data shared between the companies to the minimum necessary to operate and improve the combined search platform, and restricts the use of search data shared between the companies. The agreement maintains the industry-leading privacy practices that each company follows today.

The agreement does not cover each company’s web properties and products, email, instant messaging, display advertising, or any other aspect of the companies’ businesses. In those areas, the companies will continue to compete vigorously.

The transaction will be subject to regulatory review. The agreement entered into today anticipates that the parties will enter into more detailed definitive agreements prior to closing. Microsoft and Yahoo! expect the agreement to be closely reviewed by the industry and government regulators, and welcome questions. The companies are hopeful that closing can occur in early 2010.

The companies have established a website at http://www.choicevalueinnovation.com to provide consumers, advertisers and publishers with additional information about the benefits of the agreement.

Conference Call – 5:30 a.m. PDT, Wednesday, July 29
Yahoo! and Microsoft will host a conference call with Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to discuss the agreement at 5:30 a.m. Pacific/8:30 a.m. Eastern Time today.

To listen to the call, please dial 1-866-515-2908 in the U.S. and Canada; +1-617-399-5122 international, reservation number: 47968026. A live webcast of the call can be accessed through Yahoo!’s Investor Relations website at http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/results.cfm.

The companies have also established a website at http://www.choicevalueinnovation.com to provide consumers, advertisers and publishers with additional information about the benefits of the agreement. In addition, an archive of the webcast will be available through the same link. An audio replay of the call will be available for two weeks following the conference call by calling 1-888-286-8010 in the U.S. and Canada; +1-617-801-6888 international, reservation number: 91217610.

Non-GAAP Financial Measures
This release refers to operating cash flow (operating income before depreciation, amortization of intangible assets, and stock-based compensation expense, or OCF), which is a non-GAAP financial measure. The most comparable GAAP measure is income from operations. The estimated annual OCF benefit of $275 million included in this press release is the estimated annual benefit in income from operations of $500 million less approximately $225 million of estimated annual savings in depreciation, amortization and stock-based compensation expense.

Breaking out your sponsored search tactic from the content network in two separate ad groups helps you manage your bids better since they’re more organized and it allows you to create different ad texts for two different audiences. Some say that people viewing ads on the content network respond better to promotional-salesy copy over people who perform an actual search.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Go into your Yahoo Search Marketing campaign, select an ad group that is running both sponsored search and content network together.

1. Then, towards the middle of the page there is a button that you can click that says, ‘split ad group’. Click it!

3.  A window will pop up asking you to confirm that you want to split your ad group into two separate ad groups. Click the button that says ‘split into separate ad groups’ if you still wish to continue.

4.  From there, you will be asked to name your two new ad groups. Click ‘save changes’.

5.  Once you’ve done these steps, Yahoo will automatically separate your sponsored search from the content network into two separate ad groups. This takes about 30 seconds to complete.

After the separation is complete, you will have two brand new ad groups containing the sponsored search and content network tactics. Your original ad group that you separated, will be paused.  Keep in mind that your Quality index will reset at this point for your original ad group. After speaking with my rep. about this, this is what he had to say:

The quality index score will reset. So there will be a period of learning. This may cause terms to have a slight increase in CPC before normalizing.

So just remember not to react too quickly to changes made by the split ad groups tool. Give it at least a week or longer depending on traffic volume to make an informed decision.

I really like that every once in a while Yahoo! will surprise me with a new feature that makes my life easier that Google AdWords doesn’t have. I think it’s a great feature and I wish Google AdWords had something identical. Not that it’s difficult to copy and paste some keywords and change some settings, but it’s nice Yahoo took that step out of it and does it for you automatically.

It’s easy to track the performance of your display ads to. You can get daily reporting on impressions, clicks, CTR, conversions, spend, etc. You can set a daily campaign budget for each display advertising campaign, with a $30 per day minimum.

There are two pricing models, one for CPC (cost-per-click) and the other is CPM (cost-per-impressions).  I’m not entirely sure why people would want to pay just for people to look at their ad with the CPM model, I’d rather only pay when someone clicks on my ad which is the CPC model just like regular Yahoo search marketing.

If you’re nervous about the creative aspect of your display advertising, Yahoo has a solution. It’s pretty cool actually – you can choose from several different business categories, and Yahoo will provide you with many different display ad design templates that you can easily edit and make your own.  In the screen shot below, I selected the retail business category, and you can see the different templates Yahoo offers. What’s cool is that they also give you the impression count and click-through rate for each template. So you can choose your design based off past performance of that template.

Once you’ve chosen your ad design template, you can customize it with your information, logo, pictures and ad copy.

Now that I have customized my ad with my own logo, images, copy, etc. It shows me a preview of what my ads would look like in all sizes offered.

The next screen allows you to enter your destination URL of your ads. You can enter separate destination URL’s for each separate ad or just one destination URL for all of your ads. If you’re running analytics, don’t forget to add tracking to your destination URL!

To finish up your Yahoo display ads, you must select your budgeting, CPC or CPM bid, targeting, and industry.  Yahoo provides a list of industries in which you can advertise your ads on. You can select several industries at the same time which is nice.

The only bad thing about the budgeting is that Yahoo will recommend a CPC based on my ads and industries I targeted, and I couldn’t bid below that recommendation – which really isn’t a recommendation but a requirement to get your ads to run.  What’s even worse is that the recommended CPC for my specific ad was $3.79!  But you can set a daily budget and they will not exceed that daily budget. Again, the minimum daily budget can’t be any lower than $30/day.

To submit your campaign and begin running your ads, you have to create an account and submit your credit card information.  Or you can save your campaign as a draft and come back to it later.

I think the overall process is super easy and anyone can create an ad with their templates. You don’t target via keywords which could yield potentially unqualified traffic. However they do offer reporting so if you find there are sites that are spending too much and not converting you can remove those sites.

I think it’s a step in the right direction for Yahoo – let’s just hope it actually drives some good conversions!

Unfortunately, a number of these items are a result of shortcomings within Yahoo’s platform. Let’s face it: their interface isn’t as easy-to-use, transparent, or streamlined as Google Adwords’ interface which leaves them with a serious disadvantage (not to mention Google keeps taking more market share).

However, that doesn’t mean you should completely disregard Yahoo altogether. Your paid search marketing campaign should be diversified so that your results are not solely dependent on Google. And since Yahoo is #2, it makes sense to run a supplement campaign with them.

Now, here’s the list to help you manage your Yahoo account more efficiently:

1. Don’t import negative keywords: The import function within Yahoo works pretty well. They even have a very helpful third party conversion tool which allows you to alter your Google or MSN CVS formats so that they can be uploaded into Yahoo easily.

However, when using the third party conversion tool, you should remove negative keywords before  uploading. It’s easier to add the  negative keywords manually at the account or campaign level.

2. Ad groups are automatically set to optimize ad text: If you want to have complete control of your ad text testing (and you do) then you should opt out of having Yahoo optimize your ad texts. When you create new ad groups they are launched with this setting so you need to make this change.

Within any given campaign you can see you list of ad groups. You should check all of the ad groups and click “Optimize Ads” in the options above. Here, you’ll have the ability to turn off ad optimization.

3. The content network is severely lacking: Okay, the Yahoo content network sucks. I just didn’t want to put that in bold face type (I’m a nice guy). None of my clients generate positive results from the Yahoo content network. In fact, it’s been more of a bane than a boon for my campaigns. There can be spikes in clicks without additional conversions which often smacks of invalid clicks. I have learned to leave the content network off. However, I’m quite fond of Google’s content network.

4. Minimum bid prices  (market reserve pricing) fluctuate regularly: Keywords within Yahoo can go inactive or become active at the drop of a hat. I receive frequent notifications that keywords are now below their required minimum bid and are inactive, and I receive emails saying keywords are now active as the bids have lowered.

What to do? You as an advertiser have no control over what Yahoo deems as a minimum for a keyword. However, when you receive emails that these changes have occurred, you should always check your account because you can see a decrease in traffic when bids increase and an increase when keywords suddenly become active.

5. Use Google Analytics to track and optimize your campaign: Yahoo’s reporting within their interface is basic and not very robust. If you want to dig  into your performance at a deeper level, I highly recommend  using Google Analytics to track your results.

However, to make sure that Analytics is separating Paid and Organic Yahoo traffic, you should utilize Google’s URL builder in order to tag your traffic properly.

And there you have it. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of things to know when running a Yahoo campaign. But hopefully these tips will make your life a little bit easier.