Clix Marketing PPC Blog

And the hits keep right on coming – as if these other free resources weren’t already a treasure trove of a toolkit for educating search advertisers, Yahoo has just released a great free 43-page PDF eBook you can download here.

Yahoo’s synopsis:

It’s a guidebook geared especially toward the beginning search marketer, but it also offers tips for the more advanced Yahoo! Search Marketing advertiser.

Yahoo! Search Marketing Specialist “Sharon Goodsense” shows how the decisions you make with your account play a key role in your search marketing success. In this easy-to-read booklet, Sharon takes you through the steps of creating effective campaigns and offers helpful advice of how to make good decisions. The Smart Start Guide includes chapters on:

• Getting to know your account
• Building a foundation with strong keywords
• Organizing ad groups for success
• Writing effective ads
• Making sure your ads are high quality
• Matching keywords to your customers’ searches
• Determining effective bids
• Targeting your ads geographically
• Advertising on content sites other than Yahoo.com
• Tracking your results

Hundreds of people have downloaded the free ebook Scientific Marketing that I posted last week. It seems the message “internet marketers have a lot to learn from dirt-world experts” resonated with young marketers everywhere.

So I decided to dig deeper and find a free resource that’s a gold mine of information specifically for PPC advertisers. It addresses one of the biggest challenges we face: writing persuasive ad copy with only 95 characters or so to play with.

Turns out the issue precedes PPC advertising – generations of marketers have faced the same challenge when writing classified ads for print publications.

So I found a great ebook that teaches effective classified ad writing – you can download it here. It’s a great read, especially for the lists hundreds of of persuasive words and phrases, and the AIDA “master formula.”

Note: the book is in the form of an .exe file (a Windows application); sorry, non-Windows folks!

Note again: Here’s a PDF version of the eBook (courtesy of blog reader Wes).

Now that we’re at the beginning of the end of the eCommerce holiday buying season, some trends are evident among Clix Marketing’s retailing client PPC campaigns:

1. The number of impressions and clicks is down from previous years. It’s likely that online buyers, armed with a broader range of gift choices and savvier searching skills, are starting their gift-giving research with keywords that are more specific than those used in previous years.

2. Click-through-rates (CTRs) and conversion rates are up considerably from last year – our clients are averaging 7-15% CTR and the high end of 5-10% conversion rates. This reflects increased refinement of ad groups, and implementation of new technology like our dynamic landing page software.

3. Average cost-per-click is around 30% higher across the board – reflecting increased competition over previous years.

4. Yahoo clicks and conversions have increased sharply over previous years – reflecting an improvement in click quality and inventory. Microsoft still has the best conversion rates – one of our clients is getting an average of 25% – but click inventory is still very low.

One clear trend: the competition for Google AdWords keywords and clicks has ballooned. Advertisers will need to get savvier to attain the high CTRs and conversion rates that have, in the past, been easy to reach. This coming year we’ll be focusing on Content Network advertising, where click inventory is high and growing quickly, building on techniques described in previous Clix blog posts and my Search Engine Watch column.

We received the following info and invitation from our Yahoo friends. They’re conducting a Holiday Advertising webinar on Wednesday, November 14, and they’d like Clix blog readers to submit questions you’d like to have answered. Post your questions as comments to this post – Yahoo will be monitoring them and will feed them to Pato Spagmoletto. Here’s their pith:

Patrizio Spagnoletto, Senior Director of Marketing at Yahoo! Search Marketing, is hosting a webinar on Wednesday, November 14, that I thought you and your readers may be into. It’s called “2007 Holiday Consumer Overview and Search Best Practices” and a ton of insight will be shared – from search best practices, to the impact of combining search and display, to 2006 holiday results/ consumer trends.

Here are a few interesting stats that will be reviewed in the webinar:

Users move between paid and algo listings

66%of clicks are from consumers clicking marketers’ listings multiple times.

37% of conversions come from consumers clicking more than one of marketer’s listings, natural or paid.

12.6% of conversions credited to natural search results were actually preceded by clicks on a marketer’s paid listings, more than twice as many as occur in converse scenario.

Campaigns managed holistically – where keywords used in sponsored search also rank well in algo – deliver superior performance

 39% lift in revenue.

31% lift in perception of campaign.

Some best practices tips for marketers:

Apply seasonal modifiers to keywords.

Plan ahead and use scheduling for short term promotions and include special messaging in title and descriptions.

Create robust gift guides to encourage cross shopping to different categories and drive traffic to that gift guide.

Here’s the page where people can sign up.

Starting within the next two weeks, advertisers on Yahoo! Search Marketing will have the option to block domains of sites where they don’t want Content ads to appear – the functional equivalent of Google AdWords’ Site Exclusion capability.

We’ve asked Yahoo whether they’ll be supplying a report showing the domains where ads are appearing – similar to the Placement Performance report Google supplies. We’ll post their answer; meanwhile, here’s Yahoo’s description of the Blocked Domains capability:

Blocked Domains
Yahoo! gives you more control over your campaigns by letting you specify partner websites or sections of a website that don’t meet your business needs and on which you don’t want your ads to appear.

As you know, with Sponsored Search your ads can appear in Yahoo! search results as well as search results throughout the Yahoo! distribution network. In addition, if you choose the Content Match option your ads can appear alongside content on Yahoo! or throughout the Yahoo! distribution network. Blocked Domains lets you specify sites on which you don’t want your ads to appear, whether they’re competitors of yours, or have products or content that you don’t want associated with your brand.

Blocked Domains lets you block up to 250 domains. These can be an entire domain, a subdomain, or up to two subdirectories per domain.

Update: Yahoo is looking to offer Content site reporting “…down the road.” They advise advertisers to review web logs and other site data.

Yahoo announced two significant enhancements to the YSM PPC platform this week: a “full analytics” package (formerly offered at cost to high roller advertisers) that looks to be Yahoo’s answer to Google Analytics, and a Campaign Optimization feature that seems to automate bid management similarly to Atlas (part of the aQuantive family, now owned by Microsoft) and Dart Search (part of DoubleClick, soon to be part of Google).

We’ll report more as we test ‘em out, but for now, here’s the text of Yahoo’s announcement:

Two Tools that can Help You Understand the Value of your Traffic
Great news! As one of our most valued clients, you can now take advantage of two great account features not available to most advertisers.1. Get a deeper understanding of your traffic with Yahoo! Full Analytics
Yahoo! Full Analytics helps you learn more about your search marketing traffic, giving you greater insight into which campaigns, ad groups and keywords are delivering the results that matter most to you. Once enabled, this feature analyzes your traffic and enables you to:

•	Track different visitor types (new, returning, one-time customer, repeat customer).

To enable or learn more about this powerful feature, follow these steps:

•	Log in to your account.

2. Manage campaigns to your specific business objectives with Campaign Optimization
The Campaign Optimization feature lets you manage your monthly campaign budgets based on the business goals you deem most important. Just set the values that suit your business, and our systems will automatically show your ads that fit your criteria.

Campaign Optimization determines the best way to allocate your search advertising budget based upon past performance data, Yahoo! network forecasts, and the importance levels that you set for various actions within the sales process. You can set importance values for metrics such as impressions, clicks, conversions and return-on-ad-spend (ROAS).

To turn on or modify optimization for a campaign in your account:

•	Log in to your account.

•	Click the “Campaigns” tab.

This just out from our Yahoo! friends:

“Just a quick update on a few new features Yahoo! has added to the Panama account interface to help advertisers streamline account management. The new features will go live today,

“Move/copy keywords: You can now move and copy keywords from one ad group to another without doing the dreary copy/paste/delete thing. On the Ad Group page under the “Campaigns” tab, you’ll now see a “Move” button which will allow you to move or copy keywords from one ad group to another ad group.” Note that there is still a 1000 keyword limit per ad group.

“Streamline keyword selector tool: We now provide you with an estimate of the monthly searches on each keyword that we suggest. This provides you with more detailed information on the traffic that this keyword may be able to generate for you. As before, you can select the keywords you wish to add by clicking the box next to the suggestions and clicking “Add Keywords.”

“Ad writing help guide: When creating your ads, you’ll be able to preview ads that appear in search results for your selected keywords.”

Presentation given today. More tomorrow or Friday.

PowerPoint file here.

Today Yahoo! announced it will provide free, open access to the “Panama” search marketing APIs through the launch of the Commercial API Program. This means advertisers, developers and commercial partners will be able to build upon Yahoo!’s search marketing technologies or create new search marketing tools and apps more easily. In addition, optional fee-based, value-added services will be offered so commercial clients can fully leverage Yahoo!’s APIs for their clients.

Here’s a link to the press release.