Archive for the ‘Yahoo! Search Marketing’ Category

In the latest Yahoo! Search Marketing blog, Kastle Waserman, the Communications Manager in Advertiser Solutions, I feel is giving advertisers some not so great advice when it comes to managing your PPC campaigns.

The blog is titled, “You’re Doing it Wrong”, 5 common mistakes that can hurt your ads’ performance.

Most of the blog post is great. Points 1 through 3 are definitely best practices used among many good PPC advertisers. However, it’s points 4 and 5 that I’m having problems with.

Mistake #4 – Yahoo claims that you should never put your business phone number in your ads. I see …

Yahoo’s reporting isn’t necessarily broken but the majority of accounts are seeing significant reporting delays that stem back as far as Thursday afternoon. On Friday, we thought it might just be a fluke but when we got in to the office this morning, all of our Yahoo stats were down significantly. And this is due to the fact that none of our accounts have logged any conversion data since Thursday (4/10).

I spoke with my customer representative at Yahoo. He said that the reporting delay is being worked on by their engineers. However, he did not have an ETA on when …

I got a good chuckle today. In 5 minutes time, I received two emails for two different accounts from Yahoo! Search Marketing this morning. The first one told me that my bids were too low, and the other reported that my ads are too low of quality. Wh-what? Yahoo! must think my PPC accounts suck!
Email 1: Your Bids are Lower on Average than Most of Your Competitors

Email 2: Low Ad Quality may be Causing You to Pay More
I’ll never admit to being perfect, but the two accounts in question are two of my strongest Yahoo! accounts. …

Yahoo! is finally catching up with Google and MSN and has some new features rolling out mid-March. Here’s what they are:

1.       Day Parting:  Yahoo! has officially opened up their targeting preferences to certain times of the day.  This is the exact same concept of Google’s ad scheduling.  You can go in at the campaign level and select certain hours of the day that you would like to increase your bids.  If you find that people convert more frequently during the lunch hour 12pm – 1pm, then you can increase your bids by 10%, 20%, etc. to get more traffic …

Last summer, we wrote about Yahoo’s ad profiling program. This is a quick reminder that you need to be vigilant when monitoring for changes that Yahoo makes to your PPC campaign without your knowledge or consent.

What is Ad Profiling? Yahoo will go into your account to pause “poorly-performing” keywords (keywords with a low click-through rate) and pause “poorly-performing” ad texts.

Also, lets review the core intention of Ad Profiling, as stated by Yahoo: Our primary goal is to preserve the keyword by improving its performance. Just as in a garden you might try using more or less water or adding …

Today we received an announcement from Yahoo UK that they will be discontinuing their Content Match product in Europe. If you are running ads within a European-targeted Yahoo account, your campaigns will be effected.

Just for clarity sakes, I will sample directly from the Yahoo notification:

“As a valued client we are writing to give you advance notice of the closure of our Content Match product in Europe.

The decision to close Content Match underlines our commitment to focus on our Sponsored Search and Display business and to simplify our solutions to deliver a high ROI for our advertisers.

Content Match …

Yesterday, Yahoo Search Marketing sent out modified advertiser Terms and Conditions. We have previously discovered some surprising information when Yahoo updated their agreements, so I wanted to find out exactly what had changed.

This time around, Yahoo hasn’t made significant changes that will directly effect your search marketing campaign. Most of the changes in the new version of the Terms and Conditions are related to the dissolution of Overture Services, Inc., which Yahoo! acquired in 2003. Also, section 12 of the agreement was slightly revised due to a change …

On Wednesday Yahoo announced a new global data retention policy. Yahoo will limit its data storage period to 90 days, which is a sizable decrease from their previous 13 month policy. Yahoo is expanding this policy to apply not only to search-log data but also page views, page clicks, ad views, and ad clicks.

The European Union has expressed concerns on multiple occasions over the use of data collected by search engines, and the potential for this data to be used illegally. Yahoo has listened to this criticism and they are taking action. “In our world of customized online …