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Yahoo Search Marketing Handbook
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
May 10 2006
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Mona Elesseily has nearly five years experience crafting Yahoo Search
Marketing (YSM) campaigns for her clients but over the last 16-months,
she has been absolutely immersed. As the Yahoo! (Overture) PPC expert
working at Canadian paid search advertising firm Page
Zero Media, Mona
has enjoyed a unique opportunity to learn, explore and understand the
inner workings of Yahoo’s premier PPC program. In the autumn of
2004, she was “challenged” by her employer, Andrew
Goodman,
to write a book explaining the intricacies of establishing and managing
a successful YSM PPC campaign.
The result of her work is the Yahoo
Search Marketing Handbook, a 102-page
manual that starts with the basics, outlines potential pitfalls and gradually
guides the reader towards establishing and maintaining winning YSM PPC campaigns.
“Yahoo works if you put the time into it,” Mona said in a phone
interview. Accounting for almost a quarter of all paid search advertising
viewed on the web, Mona describes YSM as an important but tricky medium.
While it shares many similarities with the better-known Google AdWords program,
Yahoo Search Marketing has a number of unique parameters and a notably different
user-interface. “Advertisers coming over from AdWords might have problems
diving into YSM,” Mona noted.
There are a number of features and terms used by YSM that might trip up
advertisers and webmasters more familiar with Google AdWords. Mona tries
to steer her readers through the differences between the two programs without
assuming they are approaching PPC from a Google-centric point of view.
One of the major differences between the competing programs is Yahoo’s
keyword and ad matching options. Matching options allow advertisers to determine
keywords to emphasize or exclude as YSM searches for contextually relevant
venues to display their advertisements. They also allow advertisers to select
regions where various ad groups will or won’t be displayed. Understanding
how to use these options can make the difference between successful, cost-effective
campaigns and expensive failed experiments.
Partially due to Google’s longer reach and partly due to YSM’s
user interface and operability, YSM advertisers have to work a little harder
to create winning ad campaigns. “Even small campaigns can take a long
time to set up, sometimes as long as 3 hours,” says Mona. She noted
that large campaigns with thousands of keyword phrase targets could sometimes
take 40 hours or more to set up.
“Keyword research is more important working with YSM than it is with
AdWords”, Mona says. Google has a lot more distribution power and
more network partners to serve advertising to. Marketing through YSM requires
tighter targeting and strategic thinking as advertisers can pick and choose
opportunities and venues.
The book is written with the expectation that the reader has some prior
web design experience. Having a well built and optimized website is important
for making sales and satisfying long-term customers but if working in the
realm of pay per click marketing, the ability to quickly create and modify
individual pages is critical. In the handbook, Mona discusses the creation
and optimization of landing pages tailored to specific PPC conversion goals.
There are a number of labour saving tips, techniques and tools available
to YSM advertisers. Knowing how to best use them is crucial to the art of
managing a number of ad groups. The handbook is divided into sections, starting
with an explanation of the YSM interface. Other chapters discuss crafting
editorial content, Yahoo bid strategies, how matching options work, potential
financial problems, customer service issues, and include screenshots, case
studies and to-do lists.
Writing a how-to book about search marketing is fraught with peril. Often,
the moment the book is published it has already become obsolete. Mona is
already working on the outline for a second edition. Buyers of this edition
will be automatically subscribed to regular book updates via the “Page
Zero Advisor”. Mona is also planning to produce a series of Podcasts
that book buyers and subscribers will be able to access.
The hardest part in writing this edition of the handbook was working on
the outline. It took Mona over a year to figure out how to best structure
the book and research the material. Flushing it all out only took a few
months. The second edition might prove much easier, especially since Yahoo
has recently provided her with a lot of new material.
Earlier this week, Yahoo announced major upgrades to YSM’s interface
and technologies. Yahoo outlined a number of added or improved features
in a press
release issued on Monday. Scheduled for summer 2006, the press
release says the upgrades, “… will include,
- Intuitive Control Panel - provides a simplified interface with
user-tested navigation, allowing advertisers to easily understand their
performance
and providing them opportunities to modify or enhance campaigns every
step of the way
- Enhanced Geographic Targeting - leverages Yahoo!'s WhereonEarth
technology, which draws from 15 years of geo-targeting expertise
to enable Yahoo!
to more accurately understand and match to user search intent ("Soho,
NY" versus "Soho, London") and colloquial terms ("restaurant
near Fenway Park " is
in central Boston, MA)
- Fast Ad Activation - provides a streamlined content review process
that allows advertisers to launch most new ad campaigns in less than
30 minutes
- Ad Testing - supports automatic rotation of multiple versions
of ads to determine the most effective, and, over time, displays the
highest-performing ads more frequently
- Visible Quality Index - scores
ads based on quality, bid and other relevance variables, and will be
made visible to advertisers to enable
them to gauge and optimize placement when the quality-based ranking
model is
implemented
- Share of Clicks Forecasting - displays data regarding the bid needed
to achieve an estimated specific share of expected clicks, helping
advertisers to set and reach traffic and conversion volume goals
- Goal-Based Optimization - enables advertisers to let Yahoo! automatically
help find the least expensive way to meet their business goals -- defined
as Cost Per Acquisition or Return on Ad Spend
- Assists - shows advertisers the full value and contribution of every
campaign by allowing them to see how ads drive both immediate and
deferred conversions across multiple campaigns -- not just the last
click that
led to a conversion ”
The press release ends noting, “Future versions of the new platform
will include additional distribution options and audience targeting based
on factors that could include demographic information or online behaviour,
as well as additional ad formats enhanced with graphics or rich media. ”
Updates should be available shortly after Yahoo releases its new platform,
Mona said. There are currently about 420million Yahoo subscribers. It is
the second largest search engine and one of the world’s most visited
sites. Its PPC program actually pioneered the paid search advertising market.
It drives a lot of traffic.
Mona smiled across the phone line when asked to describe her overall impression
of Yahoo’s paid search platform. "YSM can be confusing and a
pain in the rump but once you understand it, it can be a very effective
advertising medium." She should know. She just wrote the book on it.
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