Creative Traffic Builders

The managers of the Yahoo! Search Marketing team presented a range of releases that were recently implemented. I’ve outlined them below for you, as presented to us at the San Diego advertiser’s workshop. They also presented a short list of upcoming releases, which I’ll be going over later as well. Let us know if you have any questions regarding these features, what issues you may have run into, or feel free to share any positive experiences you’ve had testing them!

Move / Copy Keywords

Advertisers now have the ability to move keywords from one ad group to another, if for some reason the second ad group is more relevant for those terms. Once they’re moved, they do go through the standard editorial review process. I’ve learned that keyword history is not transferred to the new ad group, it only remains in the previous group. Individually assigned keyword details are transferred, however (i.e. destination URL, etc).

This should help save some time by copying keywords instead of adding them, but the down side is you can’t “cut” keywords from one group to the other. Removing the keywords from the first group after they’ve been moved must be done manually.

Write / Edit Ad Enhancements

Necessary enhancements are being made to the “write ad” section, giving advertisers the ability to view and edit all ads on one page, view the performance of all ads on one page, view competitive ads displaying for specific keywords in the ad group, and navigate to their Best Practices page.

This is a vast improvement from having to navigate back and forth between the ad group and individual “edit ad” pages, which wastes valuable campaign management time. There remain a few lingering unintuitive functions of the write ad page, but these new improvements outweigh the current minor problems.

Keyword Suggestions

Generate suggested keywords for your ad groups with the keyword suggestion tool based on similar variations of current keywords, or based on your URL. However, keep in mind that like any keyword suggestion tool, these are merely suggestions to help broaden your campaigns. You must decide whether or not the suggested keywords are relevant enough for that particular ad group, a different ad group, or a different campaign altogether.

It’s best to keep a very tightly knit grouping of keywords in each ad group, based around the core keyword. For example:

• Kate Spade handbag blue
• cheap Kade Spade handbag
• Kate Spade handbag sale
• Kate Spade handbag purse

Low Quality Index Score

In an attempt to assist advertisers in improving Quality Index Score, YSM will be adding features to notify users when the QI is low (one bar), allow users to view low QI ads in one location, get suggestions for improving QI, and search for low quality ads.

This is a good start in helping users be aware of ads that are performing poorly according to their system, and allow low QI ads to be searched. However, since landing page relevance is not yet factored into YSM’s current quality score rating, it’s difficult to be able to optimize the ad’s quality, and is far more arbitrary than Google AdWords’ quality score algorithm. Only keywords and ad copy determine an ad’s Quality Index Score, and therefore must be continually tested for those two factors only when attempting to increase the QI.

Ad Generator

This is a tool that I have yet to use. My instinct is wary of it but you don’t learn unless you test, right? So, from what YSM says, ads are generated by mixing up pieces of ad copy we enter and gives suggested variations of ads. It may be a time saver in generating the ads, and could possibly suggest some creative that hasn’t been thought of, but I’d keep a close eye on how they perform. Feel free to test it out and let us know what type of results you find.

Hopefully all of you who are using the YSM system will test out these new features whenever you have the time. The YSM team is very open to receiving feedback so feel free to give your rep a shout if you run into a problem, come across a new feature that’s really helped you out, or have an idea for a new feature that would make your life as an advertiser easier!

Tags: ppc, ysm