Old Google Bulk Download Template
As a follow up to a previous post about the 3rd Party Conversion tool bug in Yahoo Panama, here is a .csv file if the old Google Bulk Download template header row. Old Google Bulk Download Sheet CSV (.txt)
You can convert the AdWords Editor template to this format then upload it to the conversion utility in Yahoo. It takes a little bit of work to match up the fields and fill in some of the blanks, but it is a huge time savings vs creating a full Yahoo upload sheet manually from Google data.
Technorati Tags: Yahoo Panama, Yahoo, Google, Google AdWords, AdWords, AdWords Editor, Search Marketing, Paid Search, Ironvine
Yahoo Panama Third Party Conversion Tool Bug
In Yahoo's new Panama Sponsored Search platform, they have a cool little utility that converts other parties campaigns (Google, MSN) bulk download sheets to the Yahoo format.
This is really cool, especially if you have multiple marketing platforms. You can now keep them matched in keyword updates.
There is a bug though. Google recently retired the ability to do bulk downloads from the AdWords interface. You now have to download the campaigns with AdWords Editor. The Yahoo tool, as of right now, does not work with the AdWords Editor bulk downloads. There are different field names and info between the old Google bulk download sheets and the AdWords Editor downloads.
This causes Yahoo to spit out a "System Error" message when you try to convert the file.
Solution: If you have an old Google bulk download, use that as a template and rework the AdWords Editor file to fit that. Then it will work.
Hopefully Yahoo will catch on and fix this soon.
Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Panama Search, Search Marketing, Paid Search, Google, AdWords, AdWords Editor, Yahoo Search Marketing, Ironvine
Upcoming Changes to Paid Search
There are a couple big changes to both the Yahoo and Microsoft search marketing platforms upcoming in the next 2 months.
Microsoft AdCenter has an expected new release coming out in the next 2 months with new features and updates made from testing and customer feedback. The focus to these should end up being on keyword optimization, video display ads, and support/help. Apparently this will also include a pilot program for Microsoft Content Ads, similar to Google's Content Network.
Yahoo Sponsored Search is rolling out a new ranking model on February 5th. The new model will take ad quality into consideration as well as the bid value. This comes in line with what Google already does, which follows Yahoo's current duplication of services theme. This will allow good quality ads to perform at a lower cost, or bad ads to perform at a higher cost. That will depend on the marketer and the ads.
Here's a quick summary of this important change:
- Both bid amount and ad quality will determine an ad's rank in search results beginning February 5, 2007.
- This will replace the current method, in which ads are ranked by bid amount only (bid-to-position).
- This is designed to allow you to focus less on competitive bidding practices and more on the quality of your ads.
- By improving the quality of your ads and making them more relevant to users, you may be rewarded with a better ranking and/or a lower cost for your ads.
What is "Ad Quality"?
Ad quality is determined by:
- The ad's historical performance - its click-through rate relative to competitors and normalized for position.
- The ad's expected performance - determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo!'s ranking algorithms, relative to other ads displayed at the same time.
Overall ad quality is displayed in a graphical form by the quality index.
The "historical performance" should be easy enough to understand, but the "expected performance" will be the mystery value that we can only guess at that Yahoo will be able to monkey around with.
Results of the changes TBD...
Technorati Tags: MSN, Microsoft, AdCenter, Yahoo, Sponsored Search, Search Marketing, Content Network, Paid Search, Ironvine
December U.S. Search Query Market Share
This report on the December US Search Query Market Share is produced by Citigroup's Mark Mahaney.
Here is the summary from the report that came out January 15, 2007.
Summary
- comScore released last Friday its U.S. December search query data.
- U.S. search queries grew 29.7% Y/Y in December vs. 30.5% Y/Y in November. U.S. search query growth has been surprisingly sticky this past year, showing no deceleration.We would attribute this to increased search frequency by Internet users & the greater availability of Search applications.
- Google's query share increased 40 bps M/M to a record high 47.3% of the U.S. market. This market share gain continues a very consistent trend for Google.
- Yahoo!'s query share increased 30 bps M/M to reach 28.5%. The data indicate a clear stabilization in Yahoo!'s search share in '06.
- Microsoft's query share decreased 50 bps M/M to reach a record low 10.5%.
- The Ask Network's share decreased 10 bps M/M to 5.4%, roughly in line with its '06 average position. We treat the comScore data as directionally accurate, but would not read too much into any one month's results.
This seems to follow the common averages for the past quarterly trends. Google going up consistently, Yahoo! building its power base (especially with the release of its new Search Marketing tools and Panama paid search platform) and the declining of Microsoft along with the barely mentionable Ask.
Technorati Tags: Citigroup, Google, Yahoo, MSN, Microsoft, Ask, Ironvine, Search Marketing, Internet Industry, Internet News
Yahoo Pushing to Panama
It seems like Yahoo has started giving short term deadlines for migrating accounts to the new Yahoo Search Marketing 2.0 Panama interface.
If you currently have a Yahoo! Search Marketing account and have not read up on the migration process or the changes that will happen, including the change of reporting and non-migration of past data, check on the Yahoo site for the exact changes as soon as possible. There are quite a few things you will want to know and make sure you are ready for.
If you want to migrate right away, you can submit a request to expedite the conversion process. This is not guaranteed, but it will get you in line.
You can check the new account limits, keyword, and ad text character limits here.
Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Search Marketing, Paid Search, Panama, Ads, Online Marketing, Paid Search, Ironvine
Yahoo Search Marketing 2.0 (Panama) Maximum Limits
Here is a quick reference guide to paid ad setup/creation limits in Yahoo Search Marketing 2.0 Panama Release. Below you will find the maximum number of Campaigns, Ad Groups, Keywords and Creatives you can have per account on Yahoo Panama.
Campaigns per Account: 20 campaigns
AdGroups per Campaign: 1000 keywords
Keywords per AdGroup: 1000 keywords
= Keywords per Campaign: 1 million (1,000,000) keywords
= Keywords per Account: 20 million (20,000,000) keywords
Creatives per AdGroup: 20 creatives (ad copy text)
Titles: 40 characters
Short Descriptions: 70 characters
Long Descriptions: 190 characters
Destination URL: 1024 characters
Display URL: 250 characters
During conversion from Yahoo 1.0 to Yahoo 2.0 (Panama) your current accounts are squeezed into these limits.
You can have over 20 campaigns if you currently have more, but will be unable to add anymore than the limit post conversion.
Keywords currently in categories will be split to fit into the Campaign > Ad Group > Keyword template.
Ad Groups are automatically created by pulling the Title from the Ad Copy.
Ad Groups will cap at 1000 keywords then create a new Ad Group; "[Title] 00001" if the [Title] is constant.
Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Panama, Yahoo Search Marketing, Search Marketing, Ads, Ironvine, Keywords
A Spin on Social Search Marketing
Social search marketing, what does that mean? Well you could explain it with a few other newer web terms like Web 2.0 or the blogosphere effect, but in reality it goes back to the oldest method of advertising, word of mouth. Just with the new technology we speak out online in blogs, such as this one, or social networking sites like MySpace, online message boards, and chat rooms.
There are several ways you can benefit from utilizing social search marketing. From the search engine optimization (SEO) viewpoint it is a traffic generator. If you can get people talking about you, good or bad, you are eventually going to start getting link backs to your website. Links from high quality sites are always desirable as they will reflect on your search rankings.
More Visibility = More Traffic = Higher Rankings - good SEO rule of thumb.
If you have a blog, or your employees, friends, relatives, acquaintances do or they are active in some online forum in some way, ask them for a mention and their feedback about you, your brand, or your website. You have a decent chance to start a chain reaction of subsequent posts from their readers as well.
From a search marketing perspective, every mention you get becomes some type of brand awareness. If you can get good comments from people about your product, example "Hey everyone, I tried Joe's Eatery on 1st & Wall and the food and service we excellent", then if someone is hungry and is reading the post from a real person, you have a good chance that person is going to give it a try versus going to McDonald's again.
With search marketing, especially if you have a specific product, brand, or just sell online you can get thousands of posts and feedback from online researchers, marketers, affiliates, and the average consumer. On Yahoo's Search Marketing blog they have a good post about the effect of Getting the Word (of Mouth) Out. His wife bought a camera after she read a good research report from someone about how good the quality was. That research came from someone's blog.
Some companies have begun to realize this and are recruiting people to post about their products. It is a way to market online, generally cheaply, especially if you can get a "celebrity" blogger to post about you.
If you can get links from posts, great, if you can get a mention in a post, great, if you can get people talking about you in any way (especially in a good way) you will benefit. Social search marketing gives consumers and marketers just another way to spread news via Word of Blog.
A Spin on Social Search Marketing - Go Articles - Steve Terjeson
Technorati Tags: web 2.0, blogosphere, blog, Ironvine, Yahoo, SEO, search marketing, marketing
Yahoo Publisher Network
I recently was accepted into the Yahoo Publisher Network beta program. I really like how they have it set up. One unique feature I really liked seeing was the ability to add an RSS feed ad to your WordPress or TypePad blog software.
I added this to my AjaxKnight blog today, but I haven't had much chance to test or play with it. I will be looking around for tips on how best to utilize this and letting everyone know what I find.
The interface is easy to use, not cluttered and the ad code creation section is dynamically updated with changes you make. I think the color selector needs work. I added a custom color but it is not displayed in the 'preview' box, but it does change in the code selection area.
You can find out more or apply yourself at the Yahoo Publisher Network.
Technorati Tags: Yahoo, publisher network, ads, online marketing, ironvine, search marketing, blog advertisements
Yahoo Search Marketing Bidding Information Changes
Today Yahoo sent out an email letting account managers know that their Sponsored Search accounts have changed the way they now report bidding information.
On the Manage Bids page they have removed the "Top 5 Max Bids," "Position" and "Your Cost" columns as well as the bid tool.
They have been replaced by three new columns, versus the previous announcement of two.
- Latest Available Bid Range
This column displays the latest available bid range for the positions at the top of the search results page for each of your keywords. To see the bid range for each keyword, click the View Bids link. - Average Historical Bid Range
This column uses historical data to show you what the bid range for the positions at the top of the search results page has been for each of your keywords over recent days and/or weeks. - Estimated Average Position
This column displays an estimate of the average position your listing may achieve on the results page, based on the historical bid range. If you enter a new bid in the Max Bid column and click Update Bids, the estimated average position will also update.
You can find out more from their FAQs
Technorati Tags: Yahoo, search, marketing, search marketing, ironvine, sem, bids
BusinessWeek Reports Yahoo Makeover
Makeover, overhaul, restructuring, take your pick. It sounds like Yahoo is shuffling the board to try and arrange its chess pieces in a more compact and structured way to defend against the Google onslaught.
According to the BusinessWeek article, Yahoo is going to focus its assets into 3 main categories. This situation comes by what they are calling weak and scattered ad management for paid search markets causing the company's profitability to suffer.
The overhaul, announced Tuesday night, represents Yahoo's mea culpa for meandering aimlessly during the past year, to the chagrin of investors and the delight of competitors like Google Inc. that lured away online traffic and advertisers.
Yahoo has fallen out of favor on Wall Street largely because Google -- the Internet's search leader -- has done a far better job of figuring out which ads are most likely to elicit clicks.
Yahoo has had quite a broad scope of products they have launched and run that mix and blend in their web sites, but they have not had a clear approach to how to arrange, market or implement these products for maximum effect for the brand. To go along with that several top executives have/will leave the company in the near future. Hopefully the restructuring fallout wont effect the employee base, as Yahoo maintains that it is still recruiting and hiring top talent for their work force.
Technorati Tags: Yahoo, marketing, news, advertising, search engine, search marketing, ironvine, Google
Recent Yahoo! Updates
Some recent updates from the Yahoo! Search blog.
Yahoo! now supports the 'NOODP' tag.
Following in the footsteps of MSN and Google, you can now dump ODP from all the major search engines (does Ask.com count?).
They will recognize the following META tags on your pages:
[html]
[/html]
Supporting wildcards in robots.txt
In an effort to help make the functionality of the robots.txt file more manageable, Yahoo! has added 2 wildcard characters to the Slurp supported functions. (Slurp is Yahoo's crawler name.)
'*' - matches a sequence of characters
You can now use '*' in robots directives for Yahoo! Slurp to wildcard match a sequence of characters in your URL. You can use this symbol in any part of the URL string you provide in the robots directive. For example,
[code]
User-Agent: Yahoo! Slurp
Allow: /public*/
Disallow: /*_print*.html
Disallow: /*?sessionid[/code]
The robots directives above will:
- allow all directories that begin with 'public', such as '/public_html/' or '/public_graphs/' to be crawled
- disallow any files or directories which contain '_print', such as '/card_print.html' or '/store_print/product.html' to be crawled
- disallow any files with '?sessionid' in their URL string, such as '/cart.php?sessionid=342bca31’ to be crawled
Note that a trailing '*' is redundant since that is existing matching behavior for Slurp. So, the following two directives are equivalent:
[code]User-Agent: Yahoo! Slurp
Disallow: /private*
Disallow: /private[/code]
'$' – anchors at the end of the URL string
You can now also use '$' in robots directives for Slurp to anchor the match to the end of the URL string. Without this symbol, Yahoo! Slurp would match all URLs against the directives, treating the directives as a prefix. For example:
[code]User-Agent: Yahoo! Slurp
Disallow: /*.gif$
Allow: /*?$[/code]
The robots directives above will
- Disallow all files ending in '.gif' in your entire site. Note that without the '$', this would disallow all files containing '.gif' in their file path
- Allow all files ending in '?' to be included. This would not automatically allow files that just contain '?' somewhere in the URL string
Yahoo Search Marketing Blog
New updated news on the YSM (Yahoo Search Marketing) Blog. Again they are touting the intent of the new blog to be a win/win place for marketers and the yahoo staff to learn and grow with their new product. It will contain updated news on the YSM platform and all updates planned and implemented. "Bottom line: if advertisers win and publishers win, then Yahoo! users win, and we win, too."
Some of the changes you’ll see in the short term include:
* A new control panel
Using this completely redesigned, easy-to-navigate control panel will help you see what’s working and what’s not.
* Really fast ad activation
Your ads should now go live within minutes.
* Easy ad testing
You’ll be able to test multiple versions of an ad to find the message that works best.
* Accurate geo-targeting
Target your customers broadly or narrowly on a geographic basis, and customize your ads to control costs.
* Campaign budgeting, forecasting and scheduling
You’ll be able to create, budget and schedule your individual advertising campaigns for greater control over your advertising strategy and spending.
* See-through visibility
The new interface will help you understand how well your ads are performing relative to your competitors’.