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Posts Tagged ‘Partner Network’

Last week I introduced the expanded Yahoo (YSM) network distribution options and how to find and change your account settings. As promised, this post will focus on some best practices to restructure your Yahoo campaigns to target both search and search partners.

If you are like most pay-per-click managers, your YSM account is probably a cloned export of your Google AdWords account (excluding the content network campaigns of course). Assuming your AdWords account has a strong structure, duplication across search engines is still a good practice. However, with Yahoo’s new features, can take your campaigns to the next level. It is time to revisit your Yahoo campaign structure to get the most out of the network distribution features.

How the Search Partner Network Works
First things first, Yahoo! Search Partners and Content Match are two completely different animals and it is important that you don’t confuse the two. Yahoo’s content match displays ads based on specific web page content, geographic location and/or user profile. As cautioned in the past, the content match can spend a lot of money quickly. If you are running a lead-based campaign, watch your ROI very closely.

The Yahoo! Search Partners is a network of larger websites that have partnered with Yahoo, including Ebay.com, MSNBC, and USA Today.com. If you enable Search Partners with your pay-per-click account, then your ads will appear on these websites.

How to Structure Your Campaigns

1. Maintain Focused Campaigns/Ad Groups. Factors used to determine your account quality index in Yahoo have not changed. It is still important to structure your campaigns and ad groups into highly focused content silos. This will enable you to write highly targeted ad text and drive traffic to highly relevant landing pages. In turn, your click-through rates will increase and your quality index will be stronger. If your Yahoo pay-per-click account is a mess, I strongly recommend a restructure before moving on to #2.
2. Separate Yahoo! Search and Search Partners. Yahoo now allows you to control your keyword bids on their search partner network. Performance varies greatly across Yahoo Search and Search Partners. By separating the distribution networks into different campaigns, you will have greater control over bids, allowing you to better maximize ROI.

   To target each network in a separate campaign, simply duplicate your campaigns in the Yahoo interface and set one to target Yahoo! Search and the other to Search Partners. Check out my post from last week to find Yahoo’s network distribution campaign settings. To help with account management, I strongly recommending modifying the campaign names to include a network targeting qualifier (i.e. Example Campaign – Search and Example Campaign – Partners).

3. Duplicate Your Campaigns. Thankfully Yahoo now makes it easy for pay-per-click managers to separate Search and Search Partners. Using the “Import Campaigns” function, you can now easily import duplicate campaigns into Yahoo. Just follow these instructions.

Step 1: Export the campaign you choose to duplicate from the Yahoo campaigns tab. Save to your desktop.
Step 2: Go to the “Import” section within your Yahoo account
Step 3: Select your file to upload.
Step 4: From the Duplicate Campaigns dropdown menu, select Create a new campaign. This will create duplicate of the campaign, but it will change the name to Example Campaign (copy001). Since there is a current campaign running, the default will set the new campaign to pause.
Step 5: Change your network distribution settings for the existing and duplicated campaign.
Step 6: Add “Search” or “Partner” qualifiers to the campaign names.
Step 7: Activate the duplicated campaign.

How to Optimize Your Campaigns
Yahoo launched more advanced features to provide more transparency and better management of Search Partner network performance. Use the following features to optimize your newly structured search partner campaigns:

1. Distribution Quality Report – Use this report to determine your account performance within the entire network, search only, or search partners. This report is very useful in determining whither or not to continue running on the search partner network.
2. Ad Delivery Report – This report shows specific domains performance (including corresponding conversion metrics) for sites your ads run on within the Yahoo Search Partners. Use this report to identify sites that do not translate into conversions. Since new sites can appear every day, I recommend checking this report once a week to stay on top of high cost, low-converting sites.
3. Blocked Domains – This feature can by found within your account “Administration” tab. Add low-performing sites identified within the Ad Delivery Report to your campaign exclusions. Yahoo allows up to 500 blocked domains, so use ‘em if you got ‘em!

What is your experience with Yahoo’s network distribution features? Post your thoughts, learnings and/or experiences in the comments below.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

I have to say I really love my Yahoo! Rep. He calls me whenever there are new features coming out in Yahoo! And, instead of depending on other bloggers for the info I’m hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth.

There have been some new advances made in the Yahoo Network (finally!) that may help decrease spend on non-converting domains and increase conversions are high converting domains, as well as optimize your bids on the Yahoo network or partner networks.

1. Yahoo launches distribution quality report. This report can be found in the reports tab, at the bottom of the reports list.

The distribution report allows you to see all data (clicks, impressions, spend and conversions) broken out by Yahoo! O&O (yahoo owned and operated – all yahoo branded sites) and the partner network.

This report allows you to determine whether you can afford to advertise on Yahoos! Entire network or just yahoo search only or yahoo partners only depending on your traffic and conversion rates.

If you find that you no longer want to advertise on the Yahoo O&O or Yahoo search partners you can adjust your settings so you’re only advertising on one or the other, as well as adjust bids on one or the other.

To change your settings, click on a campaign, then click on campaign settings. Under the network distribution area on the right, click edit. This will allow you to choose which network you wish to advertise on. You can also adjust your bid plus or minus a percentage of your set maximum bid on the yahoo partner sites only at this time.

2. You can also run an ‘ad delivery report’ in the reports tab under Traffic Quality Reports. This report shows you specific domains you’re ads are being served on via the Content Network or Yahoo’s search network. If you find there are several domains that are driving up your traffic and spend but not converting, you can easily block these domains.

To block certain domains, you can go to the admin tab, under the account general information there is an area for ‘blocked domains’ (right under blocked continents). Here you have the option to submit up to 500 domains to be blocked from serving your ads.

If you find that you are exceeding the 500 limit of blocked domains, you can send your domains to your Yahoo rep and they can remove domains that they no longer advertise on any longer, so you can remove those domains and add in others.

My Yahoo rep says though a great way to prevent your ads from showing on certain unqualified sites is to keep track of your negative keyword lists. Negative keywords allow you to not show up for searches that contain that keyword. For example, if you’re offering bridal magazines, you may want to add in the keyword, ‘free’ assuming your magazines are not free. This will prevent your ad from showing if someone types in the keyword, ‘free bridal magazines’.

Another great addition to Yahoo is they have expanded their negative keyword limit from 250 to 500! To add negative keywords you can add them in at the account level by going to the admin tab, then clicking on edit under tactic settings. Or you can add them in ad the ad group level by going to your ad group, click on ad group settings, and again click edit under tactic settings and add in your excluded keywords there.

There are a few more new Yahoo! features or enhancements that I’ll talk about later this week. Stay tuned!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Yahoo! has been making progress in updating their paid search platform. They have recently added some additional reporting functions that give you greater visibility into where you ads are appearing within their partner network. Today, we’ll discuss Yahoo!’s ad scheduling feature and how to best utilize it to enhance your PPC performance.

You may have noticed the relatively new column within your Yahoo! account titled, “Targeting.” Within this column you can adjust your demographic and geographic targeting, as well as your ad scheduling preferences. Here is a quick screen shot:

Within this screen shot, the little clock emblem indicates where you can adjust your ad scheduling for each campaign.

To turn your ads completely on or off, you can adjust the times for which they show. Within the screen shot below, you can see that I have selected to run my ads from 5am-10pm on Monday through Friday, and we’re not showing ads at all on the weekends.

So, that strategy isn’t too complicated to implement. With this feature you also have the option of increasing your bids during certain times of the day. However, of course, leave it to Yahoo to only allow you the option to increase your bids, but you can’t decrease them during certain times of the day. But there is a work-around to this shortcoming.

I want to adjust my bid automatically within the screen shot below. You can see that I can either increase my bid by per a certain percentage, or I can increase it by an actual dollar. amount.

If you want to solely increase bids during certain times of the day, then you’re all set! However, if you want to have higher bids in the morning and lower bids in the evening, then you have a little bit more work ahead of you. One way to work around this limitation of only being able to increase bids is this:

1. Determine what your bids should be during your high-bid time of the day. Determine what your bids should be during your low-bid time of the day.
2. Within your campaign, set your keyword bids to the lowest price that you’d like them to be during the day.
3. Adjust your ad scheduling settings to increase your keywords to your highest bids during those high-traffic, great ROI times of the day.

With this method, you set your bids to the lowest point and then use ad scheduling to increase them automatically. This way, in a sense, you are increasing and lowering your bids to improve your performance.

Ad scheduling can be a great way to improve your PPC campaign’s performance by targeting the best time of day, while shifting focus away from those times of the day that don’t generate a great ROI. You just got to know how to work the system.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.