yahoo
Looking to promote your prom dresses website in PPC?
Are you looking to promote your prom dress selling website or are you already an advertiser. Yahoo Search Marketing Blog offers some valuable tips on areas you need to target and improve to get maximum exposure, sales and traffic through Yahoo Sponsored results.
Some valuable tips:
1. Separate Campaigns
Targeting different type of customers for different theme is very important. YSM blog suggests creating separating campaigns if you are running a gift card sale as well as a prom dress sale.
2. Promotional language
Ofcourse i agree with Yahoo on this one, Promotional language is very important people love to hear words like gifts, coupons, sale, discount, offers etc. So make sure you add proper promotional campaign in the ads.
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.
Read more detailed information here in Yahoo search engine marketing blog.
Importing Campaigns / Ad groups from Adwords to YSM
Many people have contacted us asking whether there is any easy way to import keywords, campaigns, ad groups from Google Adwords to Yahoo Search Marketing. From my experience currently there are no options for the end users but yahoo’s inhouse YSM experts can add data imported from Google Adwords. But to qualify for this you need to be a privileged user .
To be a YSM privileged user you need to have a minimum Ad spend of 6000$. If you qualify then Yahoo’s inhouse search marketing experts will add the campaigns imported from Adwords into the YSM control panel.
MSN adcenter already has an option for end users but Yahoo Search Marketing don’t have such an option . So of you are thinking of importing data from adwords and adding it to YSM currently its not possible,
Yahoo now the great lord of truth
Yahoo has now added a new feature in Yahoo Search Marketing . They are now showing status of Click Filters. Click filter is a new feature where yahoo shows the status of Fraudelent clicks and the money refunded because it. This is a great new feature and possibly a by product of the merger of Click Forencics and Yahoo Search.
Recently Yahoo tied up hands with Click Forencics a company who has been loud on fighting click fraud.
Before joining hand with Click Forensics Yahoo said its click fraud rate was around 12 to 15% and most of these funds are returned to the advertisers. Google Claimed click fraud rate in their sponsored results are only in single digits.
Now Yahoo have a good reporting system where they show the status of click fraud in search results inside the Yahoo search marketing control panel and return the funds to advertisers who suffer from click fraud.
The report can be customized with the following data:
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Invalid Clicks
- Invalid Click Rate
- Click-through Rate (CTR)
- Cost
- Average Cost-per-Click
Great job Yahoo we wish to see more of such features in future.
Microsoft Ready to say Bye Bye to Yahoo
Microsoft is ready to Hostile or even walk away from the bid to buy yahoo since the 3 week long deadline is almost there. Microsoft has repeatedly said it is not willing to Raise the bid value anymore and are fixed at 31$ per share they are willing to Offer Yahoo.
Yahoo on the other hand has been stubborn to raise the bid Yahoo is probably looking somewhere in the range of 35$ per share.
Microsoft has warned before that they will take the case to the Share holders if yahoo does not accept the bid they are looking for. Analysts suggest a proxy fight is most likely and any tough stance from yahoo is not the best for its future since they don’t have much alternatives.
Yahoo changed Minimum bid value – yahoo updates bid value
Recently yahoo has made changes to the minimum bid value you a user can bid for their PPC program. Before it was 0.10 $ standard for most of the bids but now it is not anymore that value. Your bidding depends on the quality of the ads and the number of click throughs it attracts. If the user likes the ad and if it results in more clickthroughs then your site will attact a much lower bid.
Also the value of the keyword matters when it comes to bid value. If the number of advertisers are more and if they are willing to pay more for that keyword then the minimum bid value for that keyword will be changed,
PPC Blog Jeff
Yahoo kicks of with a new search engine crawler
Yahoo crawler team have come out with a new crawler that will crawl the web in a more sophisticated way. Yahoo Slup 3.0 is the new version of yahoo’s search engine indexing crawler that has been introduced recently for crawling the web. Yahoo Search engine is the 2nd most important search engine only next to Google and its very important we give attention to yahoo search rankings.
Yahoo has done a major crawler infrastructure update and this is causing massive indexing in major sites. Things should be settling down very soon but yahoo has reported new crawler activity from a different set of IPs for many sites.
According to yahoo the same derivatives in robots.txt for New Yahoo slup 3.0 will work,
“The crawlers will also publish a new user-agent, ‘Yahoo! Slurp/3.0.’ Existing
robots.txt directives for ‘Slurp’ or ‘Yahoo! Slurp’ will continue to work, but
if you have directives specific to ‘Slurp/2.0,’ they won’t be recognized by the
new crawler (though usage of the ‘Slurp/2.0’ user-agent is very rare on the web,
so you won’t likely be affected). We recommend specifying the shorter version
of: User-agent: Slurp. “
Official statement from Yahoo search news blog
Yahoo – Yhoo – willing to play more with MSFT ( microsoft )
Yahoo Inc has started playing games with MSFT to increase the bid or a possible higher sellout. Microsoft has offered 31$ per share for Yahoo which rates it to around 44 billion now Yahoo has planned to partner with Google to deliver Adwords sponsored results besides yahoo’s search results.
This looks like a desperate attempt by yahoo to make MSFT offer a higher bid for them.,
According to Financial express:
Yahoo announced on Wednesday a test to outsource Web search advertising to
Google Inc. Sources say the test is part of a planned three-way alliance to
combine Yahoo with Time Warner Inc’s AOL instead of Microsoft Corp.
If there is a possible merger with AOL then Yahoo will be a much lower brand. AOL is already struggling by itself I dont think they will make Yahoo a successful business if the merger happens.
So what should Yahoo do? I personally feel Yahoo should be sold to MSFT since Google is too dominant in Search industry now. That’s not the best thing since competition always makes better goods to be delivered to end customers.
PPC Blog Team
Pay Per Click costs – Yahoo Search Marketing Vs Google Adwords
Recently we had a comparison report prepared by our team on which pay per click programme charges more Yahoo Search Marketing and Google Adwords.
From our research Google is twice more costly and requires more budget than Yahoo Search Marketing.
We took 10 different topics auto transport, car insurance, mesothelioma, digital cameras, plasma TV, home loans, conference call, call center software, online advertising.
Under each topic we selected 10 related keywords and ran a test campaign on both Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. We tried bidding the highest just for 10 clicks. We got the top position in both Search engines for the keywords advertised. For each keyword we were able to spend for 3 clicks.
Results we got for Google top spot for these keywords is like the ad runs out in no time for the maximum click we get the 3 test clicks in few minutes for almost all the keywords. Cost of some keywords ranged from 7$ to 35$ per click.
For yahoo the same ads displayed on top position due to maximum bidding cost us in range from 10$ to 21$ also the ads took more time to get exhausted. From our testing Google adwords is more costly and active and Yahoo search marketing advertising is a bit slow. Google Adwords is atleast double the price of Yahoo Search Marketing. Infuture we will provide a detailed report on how the conversion works. Also data will be in more formal format
PPC Blog Team,
Yahoo Search Marketing New Affiliate Policy
Yahoo search Marketing was not allowing direct links to a non-personalized affiliate landing page. Yahoo’s Search Marketing has implemented New guidelines for affiliate Marketing in their ad-publishing. A publisher can have direct links to a affiliate’s page they don’t to have a customized landing page setup on their site or on the affiliate service provider’s site.
Yahoopete yahoo’s YSM support Rep who posts in Digitalpoint forums said about a year back
“Currently, we don’t accept direct links to a non-personalized merchant’s page. The landing page must be owned or controlled by the affiliate (not the merchant) or be personalized/co-branded with the affiliate’s name or business name.”
Current affiliate policy updated October 2007,
“Yahoo! Search Marketing Becomes More Publisher Friendly After more than six months in the making and much customer feedback and testing, we are pleased to announce that Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) has recently updated its editorial policies and will now allow U.S. publishers to direct link to their advertisers. In the past, YSM’s editorial policy prevented publishers from linking directly to their advertiser partners and required that traffic be sent first to the publisher’s Web site. The new policy eliminates this restriction and opens a much broader search marketing opportunity for publishers.”
Yahoo seeks higher bid from Microsoft,
According to internal news from yahoo it seems to seek ways to increase the value of its bid from Microsoft. Current value of yahoo stands at 41 billion USD, Yahoo is planning to increase it to 45 billion. Yahoo has predicted its 2010 earnings from online advertising to be around 9 billion about 70% more than its 2007 earnings. If Yahoo is capable of pleasing its investors definitely it will win a increased bid from Billsoft.
But Many Wall Street Investors predict Microsoft will win Yahoo in the current bid. Seeing Yahoo’s potential and the bid value they predict its the right bid from Microsoft to acquire Yahoo.