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New Features Rolling Out For Yahoo! Search Marketing, FINALLY!Posted by Amber on March 4, 2009 in Yahoo! Search Marketing |
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 to your site during that time. To activate Yahoo’s ad scheduling you can go into a specific campaign and edit the campaign settings. Yahoo doesn’t currently have this information online, so I can’t give you explicit instructions on where to go and exactly how to set it up until it’s launched.
2. Demographic Bidding: In addition to ad scheduling, Yahoo is now allowing advertisers to increase their bids by a percentage on certain demographics like male/female, and age groups. If you have a website mainly targeting women, ages 18 – 25, you can increase your bids for when this demographic is searching for your keywords. Any time a person signs up for a new Yahoo! account and enters their age and gender, Yahoo! collects this information and uses it so we can target to them specifically. The only catch is that Yahoo! doesn’t necessarily collect their date of birth, so whatever the age they type in when creating a new account is the age they’ll always be.
3. Targeting at the Zip Code Level: You can now increase your keyword bids at the zip code level. If you find that certain areas of a state will typically convert better again, you can increase your bids by a percentage to get more of this type of traffic to your site.
4. Content Network: another update my Yahoo! rep mentioned is that they have really tightened up their content network. Yahoo! now has better control over which ads they display on which websites. They wanted to make sure the websites were more relevant for advertiser’s keywords and websites. Yahoo! has also decrease the minimum bid for the content network from $.10 down to $.05. This is so that advertisers who have turned off their content network campaigns can feel more comfortable turning them back on to try again now that the update has been made.
Well there you have it! These updates from Yahoo! were a long time coming. Now if they could just get on board with the search query report and placement targeting!
What are your thoughts on these new features? Will they influence you to use Yahoo! more often? What other features do you wish Yahoo! could/should come out with this year?
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March 5th, 2009 at 7:05 am
Yeah this is a good step. The problem is AdWords is so far ahead, and I can’t imagine there are many advertisers on Yahoo! who haven’t be spoiled by AdWords. One of the things I find most puzzling is that Yahoo still doesn’t even have a beta available (that I’m aware of) for a desktop editor. The import function isn’t even available when you login! Item number one on their to-do, for my money, should be making it easier for the hords of advertisers already on Google to copy those accounts to Yahoo!.
March 5th, 2009 at 7:49 am
These options which are rolling out soon looks pretty cool. But, to be true here i find Google a way ahead in thinking and implementing certain features compared to any search engine. Will go with Google now, need to do a serious thinking before i look for Google alternatives. A Desktop client and free Yahoo Analytics i will be keen to look out for here from Yahoo
March 5th, 2009 at 8:13 am
@ Tom, I completely agree with you about google being way ahead of the curve. However Yahoo does have a tool that allows you to convert your google campaigns into yahoo and it’s pretty easy to use. Check out this post: http://www.ppchero.com/upload-google-campaigns-in-yahoo-in-three-easy-steps/
@Krishna, I agree that it would be nice if Yahoo had an analytics account. Not sure why they’re so behind Google, money perhaps??!
March 5th, 2009 at 8:26 am
Yeah that’s a good point…I have had some headaches sending CSVs back and forth for new accounts before the import is revealed, and I think there is a line limit for imports of ~1500 after initial import (could be wrong on this) which makes updating larger accounts a bit laborious (when you’re doing the bulk of the work in G and trying to push new changes over to Y); but you’re right once revealed the import function is relatively slick (and great article, by the way!)
Thanks!
March 6th, 2009 at 5:26 am
Does this apply to Europe?
March 6th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
@Simon, it is not going to be available in Europe yet. But my rep said he would let me know when it is. Thanks!
March 7th, 2009 at 11:31 am
[...] These new features are important to Yahoo!’s success and should prove beneficial for all PPC advertisers. I can’t wait to give these new featuees a test run. For the complete original article and information about these new features check out PPC Hero and read here: http://www.ppchero.com/features-rolling-yahoo-search-marketing-finally/ [...]
March 8th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
[...] Source:New Features Rolling Out For Yahoo! Search Marketing, FINALLY! [...]
March 11th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
I manage several affiliate sites and I am trying to have YSM tracking for several accounts on one conversion page. The tracking only works for which ever site’s tracking code is on top. If I move around the order the conversion code is placed on the conversion page the code that is on top works, but the others do not. Does anyone know what the problem is or how I can fix this?
Thanks in advance.