Cirrous Marketing

Please join us Feb. 4, 2009 for this free and informative Sponsored Search webinar

We’re offering this free webinar for our Sponsored Search customers, covering two important features: Network Distribution and Import Campaigns.

The Network Distribution feature allows you to target marketing campaigns to the entire Yahoo! Network, including Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Partners. Learn how you can control where your ads appear, use reporting to help you optimize your settings, and adjust your bids, as well as how to set premiums based on the traffic most valuable to you.

The Import Campaigns feature allows you to import your Google AdWords campaign data into your Yahoo! Search Marketing account. Learn how the tool can help you to import your AdWords campaign data, so you can leverage the insights and know-how from your Google campaign data for your Yahoo! campaigns.

To enter the webinar on February 4, you will need the password you created when you registered.

When: Thursday, Feb. 4, 2009, 11 A.M., Pacific Time
Where: The Internet—go here to register
Why: Because it’s great stuff to know for improving your campaigns and results

Cirrous.com : Yahoo

Selling the Super Bowl; digital ad budgets to increase; keeping it simple; promote your blog

Selling the Super Bowl
This Sunday is arguably the biggest sporting event of the year, Super Bowl XLIV. Advertisers, according to AdWeek, have shelled out nearly $3 million each for 30-second spots during the big game. “The game is the only significant TV showcase for commercials left in today’s media-fractured environment, and advertisers are frantically putting the final touches on their plays for the day,” writes Eleftheria Parpi. How are they are building buzz around their creative? Hint: the initials are S.M., and we don’t mean the naughty kind.

We’ve got good news and bad news
Remember those old good news/bad news jokes? (Like, the good news: the captain aboard a Viking ship doubles rations for the guys on the oars. The bad news: he wants to go water skiing.) Well, the good news for digital marketers is that two-thirds of marketing execs in a recent CMO.com/Society of Digital Agencies survey say they’ll up their digital budgets in the face of current economic conditions. The bad news? Those conditions still suck.

Keeping it simple
Savvy marketers know that people are suspicious of complexity—and they know that the way to get people to engage is to keep the message simple and straightforward. The Boston Globe’s Drake Bennett shows how “cognitive fluency” can help you to get into people’s psyches because, in people’s minds, “easy = true.”

Tips for promoting corporate blogs
Last week, we took note of a recent TopRank survey that showed how blogging can enhance SEO. This week, TopRank blogger Thomas McMahon follows up by offering several useful tips for promoting your blog and keeping it alive. All common sense, but sometimes we all need to be reminded just what common sense is.

—Michael Mattis

Cirrous.com : Yahoo

Four simple steps to help your campaign keep up with new searches

I can’t possibly be the only person that remembers the line “just set it and forget it”.  Those were the good ol’ days—the same days as when you could just set up a search marketing campaign and leave it alone. 

Not anymore. Users are more sophisticated in their searches now, and we’ve seen that up to 20% of searches in any given month can be search queries never seen before by a search engine.  This means if you leave your campaign untouched, you could be missing 20% more traffic.

So what’s the best way to keep up to speed with the changing search tide while maintaining your sanity?  Here are our four simple steps that will help your Yahoo! Search Marketing campaign keep pace.

If you’re a do-it-yourselfer, you can use our new Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop tool.  It allows you to easily execute bulk changes and optimizations within an intuitive desktop interface, spending less time on the tactical details of campaign management while maximizing your returns.  And if you happen to have your campaigns managed by SEM Agencies, you can check with them to see if they are doing all these things to give you the best performance.

1.  First off, let’s set up the campaign properly
Start off making sure your campaign is opted into Advanced Match (this is the default setting).  Advanced Match campaign will display ads for a broader range of searches relevant to your keywords, titles and descriptions, or web content than you may have thought of yourself. This includes concepts that are related to your keyword, but that do not necessarily contain your keyword.  Think of Advanced Match as the sales guy that’s going above and beyond to bring in great leads where you least expected them. 

Which keywords should you start with first?  Well, if you have a big budget and want to focus on driving traffic, then you may want more high-volume search terms (e.g. car) in your campaign. If your objective is getting higher conversions, you may want to include more tail terms as they are more product specific (e.g., new 2010 Toyota Prius hybrid car).  Make sure to use excluded words (or negative keywords) to avoid matching to terms that are not relevant to your product or service. 

2.  Monitor your campaign regularly
Because search habits constantly change, you should tune your campaigns as regularly as possible.  The frequency really depends on you and what your objectives are, and if you’re meeting those goals or not. 

The best way to determine your campaign’s performance is through the myriad of reports available through our reporting tools.  It’s kind of like when you check traffic in the evening to determine the best route to take home.  You may choose to take the shortest route but sit in a little bit of traffic (or a lot if you’re on highway 101).  Or you may choose a route that is longer but less traveled, and gets you home 15 minutes earlier.  The same logic applies to your campaign.  Know your objective, and look at the reports to help you get there.

Once you have some insight about which campaigns and keywords are performing, here are some things you can try:

• Work with your account manager to identify additional keywords and bid opportunities.
• Take advantage of our keyword suggestion tools & discovery tools to supplement your existing keywords.
• Use organic search results to optimize campaigns and expand your keywords or add excluded words to avoid future matches.

3.  Tune your campaign
By now you have a pretty good idea which keywords are doing well in your campaigns, and which ones are lagging.  It’s time to take action.  Separate lower performing keywords from higher performing keywords so your high performers aren’t dragged down by your low performers.  Create a “low budget” campaign that includes all of your low performing keywords, and use lower bids so that you continue to participate in the marketplace. 

Another tuning technique is to separate keywords that get a lot of clicks from low-volume keywords.  This allows you to tweak your ad copy for the greatest impact on the high-volume terms.  Mixing the two may dilute your campaigns overall performance, and make it difficult for you to determine which keyword is negatively affecting your campaign’s Quality Index.

 4.  Sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor…but don’t get too comfortable
Now that you’ve tuned your campaigns, give it some time to see how each campaign performs, but don’t let it simmer for too long.  The duration really depends on how much traffic you’re getting.  You may notice changes taking effect immediately, or you may have to wait a few days or weeks to see the full impact.    

At the end of the day, where does this cycle of keyword addition, monitoring, separating, tuning, re-running your campaign take you?  It allows you to improve your ad quality and your campaign performance.  The better a campaign’s performance, the less it’ll cost you to participate.  And who wouldn’t want a few extra dollars back in their pockets?

Besides, if you’re not managing your campaign regularly, you can bet your competitor is—and possibly taking traffic away from you.  To protect your traffic and your business, we encourage you to actively manage your campaign. Don’t just set and forget it!

—Payam Tehrani, product manager, Sponsored Search ad selection

 Author’s note: I welcome your feedback on this blog, and highly encourage you to share your experiences and offer your best practices in managing your Yahoo! Search Marketing campaign.

Cirrous.com : Yahoo

Quantifiable creative; blogging enhances SEO; search surges; kids more plugged in than ever; celebrating Guy Day, and more

Three simple steps to better creative
Let’s face it, a lot of agency creatives like to blather on about “inspiration” and the “creative process.” But, says iMedia Connection blogger, Robert Boman, (who is also Javelin’s Interactive Creative Director), “Marketing is a profession, not an art show. Your work’s got to be far more than just eye candy. It needs to be smart. It needs to be trackable.” He offers a handy, three-step process for creating measurable marketing.

Survey says: Blogging enhances SEO
Writing on TopRank’s Online Marketing blog, Lee Odden reveals the results of a TopRank survey that asked 326 marketing pros if they thought blogging had a positive effect on their SEO. Most did. In fact, more than 87 percent of respondents said blogging had “successfully increased measurable SEO objectives.” A common reason why some companies don’t blog or quit blogging? Resources.

Search usage jumps 50% in one year
According a new PC World report, Web search jumped a full 50% from 2008 to 2009. In fact, last year there were more than four billion searches each day. “We knew this was going to happen,” says Tribble Ad Agency blogger TheFounder, “and it’s going to get bigger and bigger for quite some time. Search has become the definition of marketing and advertising.” All true, but you heard it here first.

The 10 habits of highly effective CMOs
You’ve probably heard of the perennial self-help bestseller, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” But what’s it take to be a top Chief Marketing Officer? Jim Stengel, the highly effective former global marketing officer at Procter & Gamble, offers 10 tips, for free.

Kids: Plugged in or couch potatoes?
A new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that kids aged 8 to 18 are more plugged in now than ever, spending 7 ½ hours a day, or nearly 53 hours per week, with electronic media. How does that daily usage break down by media and minutes?

• TV: 270
• Music: 151
• Video games: 73
• Mobile phone chat: 33
• Texting: 90
• Computing (non school): 89

Creative Spotlight: Bye, Guy
Today’s Creative Spotlight is not about a piece of creative. It’s about a creative. Legendary ad man and Chiat/Day co-founder, Guy Day, who brought us such compelling creative as Apple’s infamous “1984″ Super Bowl spot, has died. He was nearly 80 years old. Hats off to one of advertising’s greats.

Here’s a clip of the original “1984″ ad. For those old enough to remember, it was just about the darndest ad anyone had ever seen on TV up to that point. Enjoy. And thanks, Guy.

(Logic-Creative image by RabiD Son, via Flickr, CC 2.0)

—Michael Mattis

Cirrous.com : Yahoo

Network distribution and import campaigns features give greater control over your campaigns

We resolved to deliver to our Sponsored Search advertisers two great new features in the new year: network distribution control and an import campaigns tool. These items may have been on your wish list for a long time, and as of today, the wait is over. Here are the details:

Network Distribution
This new feature enables you to set up campaigns or ad groups targeting Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Partners, or both.

If you select Yahoo! Search, your ads will appear only on Yahoo! search results pages. If you select Yahoo! Partners, your ads will appear across our partners’ pages, including WebMD, Buy.com, CNBC and CitySearch.

With the network distribution feature, you can choose for your ads to appear only on Yahoo! search results pages, only on Yahoo! partner implementations, or across the entire network. Even if you choose to target a campaign or an ad group to the Entire Network (i.e., both Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Partners), you have the ability to fine-tune your bids with different bids for Yahoo! Partners.

If you’re familiar with our system of pricing discounts, you know that your clicks are automatically priced according to our assessment of the performance of traffic coming from various sources within our distribution network.

While your campaign objectives will determine the best use of network distribution, we recommend that advertisers target the Entire Network to maximize traffic volume, while retaining the ability to bid up or down on Yahoo! Partners. For more control and optimization capability, you may wish to duplicate key campaigns, with one targeting Yahoo! Search and the other targeting Yahoo! Partners.

The following tools can help you get the most out of this new feature:

• Network Distribution Performance Report – Enables you to view reporting by traffic source at the campaign, ad group and keyword levels.
• Ad Delivery Report – Provides insight into where your ads are showing on our various partners’ sites, and domain-level performance.
• Blocked Domains – Block up to 500 domains that aren’t working for you.
• Conversion-only Analytics – Allows you to track conversion events by domain, and record revenue that might be associated with a transaction.

Import Campaigns
This new tool is designed to help you easily and efficiently convert your campaign data from Google AdWords into Yahoo! Search Marketing formats. Simply download your third-party file, then import it from your computer into the Sponsored Search interface. You can import your file by selecting the “Import Campaigns” button, which is located on the Dashboard and the Campaigns tabs, or by selecting the Import tab.

Once the import is complete, you’ll be able to view any errors and pause the campaigns for review. Learn more about converting and importing your third-party campaign data.

Free Webinar
To get more details on the network distribution and import campaigns features, sign up for our webinar, scheduled for Thursday, February 4 at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time.

— Jeff Hecox

Cirrous.com : Yahoo

Yahoo! rings in 2010 with search advertising enhancements that deliver

Last fall, I answered the question “Does search still matter to Yahoo!” with a definitive YES.  But words only go so far, which is why Yahoo! is rolling out new search enhancements for users and advertisers.

All about control
Next week, we’ll update our Sponsored Search product with two new features aimed at giving advertisers more transparency into and control over their accounts. Our Network Distribution feature will let you run your ads on Yahoo! search pages, our partners’ sites, or both.  If you run your ads on our entire network, you can also set different bids for Yahoo! or its partners.

We’re also launching a new tool that makes it easier for you to get started with Yahoo! Search Marketing. We know there are many advertisers who use other search marketing providers such as Google Adwords, so we’ve built a feature allowing easy and efficient conversion of your AdWords campaign data into Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns. You can import your files by simply clicking the “Import Campaigns” button. We believe the ease of launching campaigns with your existing data will encourage more advertisers to use Yahoo! search. You’ll hear more about both of these new features in the coming weeks.

Our sales team has some new tools to help advertisers who work with a Yahoo! account representative, including a web-to-mobile migration tool that makes it easy to move a traditional paid search campaign to our mobile paid search platform. Another tool automatically adds relevant new long-tail keywords to a campaign as our systems show that users are now searching for them. Additionally, we know  that advertisers can add thousands of keywords/terms into their account at any given time, so we built a tool that can group them into ad groups by relevance automatically.

More relevant searches
More than 2.5 billion searches are conducted on Yahoo! monthly (comScore, November 2009), and we’re constantly tweaking our search results page to make it easier for users to find things. The more relevant our searches, the more targeted opportunities advertisers will find. Our new search results page makes it easier to sort and filter results, including shortcuts that shows up-to-the minute tweets and news links for breaking headlines.

Since not all Web information is text-based, we’ve also launched better ways to sort multimedia searches. Our video search refiner lets users explore their favorite TV shows, movies and musicians in an intuitive way. The image search refiner lets people explore celebrities and places of interest and easily find more contextual information about them.

Better results for advertisers
Are our search initiatives working? That’s what we’re hearing from our advertisers. Covario, a leader in software and services for paid and organic search management, recently reported that the cost of clicks on Yahoo! decreased for their clients by 20-25%, and as a result their clients increased spending on Yahoo! by 36.5% in the fourth quarter of last year. The Pronto Network, a leading shopping comparison site owned by IAC, increased their ROI by 5-8% after seeing a 10-15% drop in the amount they were paying for clicks, and adjusting their bids to secure the best possible placements of their ads.

Try out these new features or talk to your account manager for more information. I look forward to telling you about more search advances in the coming months—and invite you to take a closer look at us to see if Yahoo! can bring you the same kinds of results.

—David Pann, Yahoo! vice-president and general manager of search marketing

Cirrous.com : Yahoo

Using the ADR and blocked domains to your advantage

Back in the day, family road trips were incomplete without maps. Actual, paper maps. The kind that were supposed to fold neatly into a rectangle when not in use, though in most cases, probably ended up crumpled on the floorboard or dash of the sedan.

Luckily for most of us, technology took over, and instead of relying on a state atlas or old-fashioned city grid, we can now print out door-to-door driving directions online, or even fancier, rely on a GPS device. And though some probably still prefer the thrilling adventure of just hitting the open pavement with no specific destination in mind, most of us like to know where we’re going, and the fastest, most logical way to get there.

This is the idea behind our recently launched Ad Delivery Report (ADR.) By navigating to this spot in the account interface and selecting a date range, you’ll get a list of all of domains in our network that are driving traffic to your account. If you’ve installed Full Analytics, you can also access domain-specific conversion data, which is another bonus.

The concept behind the ADR is really one of transparency. We believe that rather than sharing a high-level list of partners in our network—which may or may not be sending traffic to your account—it makes much more sense to provide you with the actual list of domains that are contributing to your clicks. This way, you’ve got a clear view of where your ads are served, something that will aid you in your quest for tailoring the traffic mix at the account level.

Meaning?
Well, by poring over the ADR—and either our Full Analytics conversion data or your own third-party conversion stats—you can make informed decisions about which domains do or don’t meet your performance thresholds. This, in turn, will factor into your decisions relating to domain blocking, which is a great way to improve the overall performance of your account.

Say, for example, that you’d like to eliminate referring domains that are contributing more than 100 clicks and are converting at less than 0.05%. By reviewing the ADR combined with your conversion information, you can isolate any domains that meet that criteria and then block those using our blocked domains functionality. This essentially removes those domains that aren’t performing to your standards, which ultimately will benefit your traffic quality mix.

And unlike the sometimes illogically persistent and oftentimes monotonous tone of the voice-enabled GPS, our ADR will simply show you the stats and let you navigate from there.

— Malin Kennedy, Senior Manager, Advertiser Experience

Cirrous.com : Yahoo

Yahoo! and Electus’ Ben Silverman announce new content, ad delivery concept

Three words: Content, content, content.

Over the past decade, cable TV has experienced tremendous growth because of its ability to develop programming for very specific audiences, telling the stories that those audiences love to hear. At the same time, it has provided opportunities for advertisers to reach their core audiences, telling the stories that advertisers need to tell. 

Like cable, online today is poised to do just the same, and more. Yet, despite the targeted programming capabilities available, online publishers and advertisers have yet to take full advantage of the medium in terms of content development. That’s where today’s announcement comes in.

Yahoo! has just announced a partnership with Electus, a new venture headed by Ben Silverman, former co-chair at NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios, who has been involved with such hit shows as “30 Rock,” “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” “Saturday Night Live,”  “The Biggest Loser,”  “Celebrity Apprentice” and “The Office.” This guy knows how to tell a story.

The Yahoo!-Electus partnership is all about producing original programming, as well as giving advertisers new opportunities to integrate their brand messages—their stories—into the next generation of online programming.

We look forward to working with Ben and Electus, and getting your messages and stories out.

—The Team

Cirrous.com : Yahoo

The top 7 how-to’s of 2009

Well, it’s not quite like “Dear Abby,” but last year’s how-to posts from the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog and the Yahoo! Advertising blog are the next best thing. In the last year of the “aughts,” we tried to help show you the way to more effective Sponsored Search, and more effective Web advertising in general, with a bevy of posts that answered your most pressing questions—everything from how to develop strong keywords to how to keep those keywords and descriptions from facing rejection, to how to use social networks like Twitter and Facebook to get your messages out.

Here’s just a sample of what we shared (for more, visit the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog archive):

1. Build your foundation with strong keywords
When it comes to keywords, one way to get more conversions is to get really nitty-gritty. Consider bidding on more specific keywords that contain things like the brands you sell and even specific model numbers. In other words, think like your customers.

2. Tidy up to improve account performance
You know how it is with your garage, your desk at work, your computer’s desktop and files—just about everything gets cluttered, and thus, difficult to manage. Here are five ways to increase your performance by tidying up your account structure, keywords, ad quality and so forth. What was true in 2009 is just as true today.

3. Improve your quality score
We know you probably weren’t an English major, but even if you were, writing search marketing ads probably wasn’t taught in that Victorian Lit class you so enjoyed and got an A+ in. It’s a tricky business, writing high quality search ads, what with a slew of products and services and just 40 characters with which to promote your business. Here are four ways to improve your ads for lower cost and higher placement.

4. Rejecting rejections
Ouch! Rejection hurts. But we in Internet advertising have our standards. At least with us, it’s not personal. In fact, there are at least five pretty simple ways you can can use to help your ads avoid rejection by our editors. Forewarned is forearmed, and a little knowledge up front will help get your ads through the gauntlet. If only Internet dating was this easy!

5. Start out on the right foot
Listen, no one is a search advertising expert, at least not right off the bat. But you want to start out on the right foot. Smart starters focus on three major areas: keyword selection, good copywriting (which includes your title keywords) and testing two or more ads against one another. Give it a shot.

6. Bidding with your brain
When bidding on keywords, it all comes down to arithmetic, to wit: profit, CPA, ROAS and ROI. Good ad writing isn’t all fun, games, and cute wordplay—it’s an admixture (sorry for the pun) of both. To paraphrase Chuckles the Clown it’s, “a little song, a little dance and little arithmetic down your pants.” Oh, you want the algebraic details? Look here.

7. Marketing with social networks
This one’s a freebie. Yahoo’s got relationships with social networks like Facebook and Twitter—hey, they’re on our new homepage—but we don’t own ’em. So if you want to promote your business through ’em, we’re all for it. In this post, author and entrepreneur Clara Shih offers three solid tips on how to do just that.

—Michael Mattis

(Image by awezmaz, CC, 2.0)

Cirrous.com : Yahoo

What can you do with a Yahoo! display ad? More than just display, for starters

Whether video, Web or mobile, Yahoo! display ads are rocking the house down, branding your products, sending the messages you want and getting the ROI you want, as this video shows. Enjoy, and happy new year!

—The Team

Cirrous.com : Yahoo