Last Thursday and Friday, Yahoo! Search Marketing rolled out their new pricing structure. The gist of this update is that minimum bid prices will no longer be fixed at $0.10 and will instead be based on quality factors (similar to Google’s Quality Score). From a big picture view, this seems like a logical progression for YSM. However, many advertisers have expressed frustration with this change and its adverse effect on their bid prices. Today …

Pay-per-click marketing and web analytics – they go together like peas and carrots. Why you ask? Because the reports provided by the PPC search engines aren’t always enough! Services like Google Analytics provide advertisers with a wealth of knowledge for fine-tuning and perfecting their paid-search campaigns. This includes data like bounce rate, time on site or goal funnel visualizations. For advertisers who are using Analytics in tandem with their AdWords PPC account, the process for …

Today Yahoo Search Marketing announced that your minimum pay-per-click bids are going to be changing. Currently, the minimum bid is $0.10 (ten cents) across the board for every keyword. However, the announcement made today states that minimum bids will no longer be fixed but will vary.  This change will affect only sponsored search keywords; the content network minimum bid will remain as is, at $0.10 (ten cents).

How will your new minimum bid be determined? There are a two main factors …

“They’ve never really explained to me why this happens, it just does”, says my Yahoo! rep about my conversion tracking being automatically turned off because I didn’t generate any conversions within a 45 day time frame.

This came up about a month ago when I noticed the conversion column was missing in the Dashboard of my Yahoo! account. I knew I had not only turned on conversion tracking a while ago but you also have to enable it, …

Have you ever spent hours trying to re-structure your Google campaign to upload into Yahoo!? You download your Google campaign, re-arrange the columns to fit Yahoos! upload structure, only to get errors from Yahoo! saying they can’t determine which is the parent ad group? I’ve encountered this many times, and just recently I found a tool in Yahoo! to help with this problem. It’s the ‘Convert Third Party Campaigns’ tool under the import feature of the Yahoo! …

The team here at Hanapin Marketing has recently become a certified company in Google Adwords, Yahoo! and MSN AdCenter. In this post I’ve listed the top three search engines and how to become a certified individual or company. I’ve included information such as benefits, costs, how to access the learning materials, tips on taking the exam and requirements to becoming certified.

Why should you or your company become certified? Credibility of course! Being a certified member of the …