Notes on the Yahoo / Bing Transition

Yahoo advertisers received an email outlining a few more terms regarding the upcoming transition to the Microsoft Advertising adCenter platform.

Some quick points:
1. A Tab will show up in “YSM later this month”, so be sure to login and look around.
2. Yours ads can server in adCenter right away when you transition.
3. Silverlight will continue being used. I still need to test and see what functionality might be missing when I login from my iPhone or an older mac. I hope whatever missing features degrade well!
4. The upcoming changes to organic search are later this month. We anticipate a rocky ride, as Microsoft will likely need to make ongoing tweaks.

Dear Advertiser,

As your transition to the Microsoft Advertising adCenter platform approaches, we have more details to share to help you prepare for the changes to come.

Considerations for your upcoming transition

adCenter account
Soon, you’ll need to either create a new adCenter account, or link an existing adCenter account to your Yahoo! Search Marketing account. Later this month, you’ll see an “adCenter” tab within your Yahoo! Search Marketing account. Clicking there will take you to the beginning of the account transition process, where we’ll walk you through the simple steps to create or link accounts.

Budgeting
Once you create your adCenter account, it will be active and your ads will be eligible to serve on Bing right away. As a result, you’ll be managing both your new adCenter account and your existing Yahoo! Search Marketing account in parallel until ad serving for Yahoo! traffic transitions to adCenter, so plan to budget accordingly.

Microsoft Silverlight
With Silverlight installed, you’ll be able to see and address key differences between your Yahoo! and adCenter accounts as you transition. Download Silverlight now.

Organic search transition
Yahoo! organic search results will be powered by Bing as early as late August. If organic search results are an important source of referrals to your website, you’ll want to make sure that you’re prepared for this change. For more details, check out this blog post.

As we’ve stated previously, our primary goal is to provide a quality transition experience for advertisers in the U.S. and Canada in 2010, while protecting the holiday season. However, please remember that as we continue to go through our series of checkpoints, if we conclude that it would improve the overall experience, we may choose to defer the transition to 2011.

We are committed to making this transition as seamless and beneficial for you as possible. We appreciate your business, and look forward to bringing you the benefits of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance.

Sincerely,
Your Partners in the Search Alliance, Yahoo! and Microsoft

6 PPC Secrets from a $100k campaign

There was an excellent story in the San Francisco Gate in May about Lake Champlain Chocolates, and the lessons they’ve learned with Pay Per Click Advertising. The story title is “PAY-PER-CLICK PROBLEMS: Emeryville gourmet chocolate company has a rough go of it“, but the real value of the article is the PPC secrets it gives away. The article discusses two chocolate retailers: Lake Champlain Chocolates and Charles Chocolates. Lake Champlain Chocolates has experienced successful growth due to their PPC campaign, but Charles Chocolates did see any measurable growth from theirs.

1. Use negative keywords
In the article, words like “cheap” and “free” were used as negative keywords to avoid showing ads to less affluent searchers. Every time you show an ad it’s like holding out a dollar bill for your searcher to snatch away. Be sure to get a prospective customer in return!

2. Refrain from using the content network
Google AdWords users expect that the content network will show ads in all the right places. In a perfect world, new customers would see your ad and keep you in mind for their next purchase. But it isn’t a perfect world(Don’t even get me started!). Consider:

- Visitors probably will not click. Content ads are like billboard ads. How often do you see a billboard and pull off of the highway to make an immediate purchase? It’s highly unlikely. Like the company in the article learned, “The return was never there.”

- Visitors who click your ad won’t buy that day. They were reading, not shopping. At best, they will signup for your newsletter or bookmark your page. Is the landing page converting them into bookmarking or signing up? Probably not. Either fix that, or turn off the content network for now.

- Clickfraudsters will click your ad and keep half. Click fraud is a plague of the content network. Last June, Outsell estimated that click fraud could be as high as 14 percent. The real estimate is probably a little lower, but click fraud does exist.

3. Use large sets of focused keywords
The successful Lake Champlain Chocolate seller had a keyword set as high as 70k at one time, and now has it trimmed down to 30k. That’s  a big keyword set!

4. Use advanced keyword features
One of the issues Internet Marketing Consultant Lael Sturm found with the struggling Emerville Chocolate Retailer Charles Chocolates was that they “hadn’t modified the ad text to match each specific keyword.” Be sure to use the advanced keyword options that PPC engines like Google AdWords provide. In Google AdWords, the code is {keyword: your keyword}. This option shows the keyphrase your user was searching for in the text of your ad.

5. Measure and adjust
Is money being wasted in your campaign? You won’t know unless you are measuring. Lake Champlain saw they spent money attracting a searcher for “Chocolate covered scorpions,” something they didn’t sell, and decided not to let that happen again. Along with measuring what ads are the most effective, be sure to measure what you are paying for and remove/adjust the ads lacking good ROI.

6. Outsource your campaign to professionals to dramatically increase your sales
Even with Lake Champlain Chocolate’s success inhouse, they were able to DOUBLE their sales by outsourcing their PPC management to professionals. You just can’t beat having the right help. Get to your friendly neighborhood search marketing agency today!

Search Marketing Standard: Read it twice

I’m still getting two copies of Search Marketing Standard magazine, but I’m not reporting it. First off, it’s so good that I don’t want to possibly miss an issue by having anyone mess with my subscription. With other magazines, I’ve found that fulfillment centers sometimes get confused, and it’s usually months before I realize a certain issue isn’t coming. I just can’t risk it. Every article is good.

Secondly, I’ll probably read through it twice. Might as well have a fresh crisp copy the second time. I wonder if I’ll even dog-ear the same pages?

Here are four excellent resources for anyone interested in SEO, internet marketing, ecommerce, and the affiliate scene:
1. Search Marketing Standard. If you’ve thought the SEO world moves too fast for print, think again.

2. Practical Ecommerce. Not just for ecommerce store owners. Every web developer creating ecommerce websites should be in tune with the industry.

3. Revenue. Great for affiliate marketers, ecommerce merchants, or any company creating PPC(Pay Per Click) campaigns on Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing.
4. Internet Retailer. Especially important if you are helping larger companies with their SEO, SEM, PPC, and ROI! This publication is best at industry trends influencing larger retailers and online merchants.

It is essential that web designers and web site developers start paying attention to the many facets that can make or break an online business. These publications can help get you serve your clients!

MSN adCenter Update: Will it compare to Google AdWords?

For those of you not currently signed up with MSN adCenter, you may want to give it a look(starting tomorrow).

On April 26, 2007, we’re upgrading Microsoft adCenter with the improved navigation, reporting, and campaign management features from our beta site…

While I currently like some of the MSN adCenter demographic targeting and PPC keyword bargains, I think they have room for improvement. Will this be MSN’s “Panama” upgrade that catches it up to Google? We’ll know soon enough!
Also from the email:

Additional feature upgrades will also occur on April 28, 2007. During this upgrade, adCenter will be unavailable for up to 24 hours starting at 12:00 P.M. Pacific Time. Your ads will continue to run as scheduled during both adCenter upgrades.

With these upgrades, you’ll experience new features that will allow you to:

• Search within your campaigns. Use full text search to easily find ads, keywords, ad groups, campaigns, and accounts. Please note that orders are now called ad groups.
• Save important items in Favorites. Tag your campaign items for follow-up using Favorites.
• Quickly navigate your accounts. Use the improved navigation to quickly navigate to any campaign or ad group in your account.
• Easily access help content. Hover over the green question mark icons for pop-up help tips.¹
• Manage keywords faster. Bulk edit keyword settings and delete low-performing keywords.
• Save time importing campaigns. Directly import your campaigns from other search advertising programs.
• One click downloads. Download your datasets into Excel with one click.
• And more! View our blog and watch the webinar for tips and training on these new features.

If you have any questions, please contact our adCenter support team.

Sincerely,

The Microsoft adCenter Team

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are you upgrading Microsoft adCenter?

Over the past few months, we’ve been running improvements on the adCenter beta site, which has been available to customers in our U.S. Content Ads pilot. Now, it is time to share these new and improved features with all advertisers.

Will my campaigns be affected?

Your campaigns will continue to run as scheduled. With this upgrade, using adCenter is now easier and more efficient. The updates provide you with improved campaign management, navigation, and reporting.

Where can I learn more about the most recent updates to adCenter?

Our webinar, walks you through the features that will be included in this upgrade, and additional information can be found on our adCenter blog.

¹ This feature will be available after the April 28, 2007 upgrade.