A little about Yahoo! Search Marketing
There is a trend in the search engine marketing industry toward account automation achieved via automated bid management tools supplied by the search engines. Yahoo! has some interesting automatic management options that we have found to work fairly well. The first is its Tune Up Campaign feature. With this option, Yahoo! will perform an analysis on your account that takes into consideration several factors, such as performance history, your budget, and a chosen metric (either impressions or clicks). You will be presented with a list of suggested changes to your campaign, which you can either accept or deny. To initiate a campaign tune up, click the button on the campaign detail screen labeled "Tune Up Campaign".
Yahoo! also has a campaign optimization feature which automates ongoing bid management. The difference between campaign optimization and campaign tune up is that optimization is an automated ongoing process, whereas a campaign tune up is a one-time event. With optimization, you specify your monthly budget and Yahoo! will modify your campaign based on either a "conversion funnel" or a "business objective".
The conversion funnel option spends your campaign budget based on a set of priorities that you set. These priorities include customers seeing your ad, customers clicking your ad, and conversions. Yahoo! provides a scale that runs from "Not important" to "High". Specifying an importance level for each priority will cause Yahoo! to adjust bids differently. For example, if your main goal is visibility by displaying your ads to as many people as possible, you would set the "Customer seeing your ad" option to a high priority. If generating conversions at a target cost is your top priority, you would set the campaign conversion priority to high and specify your target conversion cost. You can also set a target return on ad spend as your high priority event.
The business objective optimization option lets you specify the value for a parameter: your target cost per click, cost per conversion, or cost per thousand impressions (CPM). It is very similar to the conversion funnel option but is more straightforward. There is no setting of priorities - just a dollar amount for the most important parameter. If you have conversion tracking in place and know exactly how much you can afford to pay per conversion, or what you can pay to generate the most total conversions at maximum profitability, then you should use the cost per conversion option. Ultimately, that is the most important parameter - what it costs to get a new customer or qualified prospect.
We have found Yahoo!'s campaign optimization feature to work reasonably well once it has run long enough to make the necessary changes. They are definitely worth a try. However, it would be a serious mistake for you to just set it and forget about it. It may be the case that Yahoo! technically does what you told it to do, but it could end up producing the wrong results. For instance, you might specify a target cost per click, which Yahoo! achieves, but it could shrink your total traffic so much that it becomes pointless. So keep an eye on things to make sure that Yahoo! is making adjustments that are going to help you reach your goals.
Yahoo! also has a campaign optimization feature which automates ongoing bid management. The difference between campaign optimization and campaign tune up is that optimization is an automated ongoing process, whereas a campaign tune up is a one-time event. With optimization, you specify your monthly budget and Yahoo! will modify your campaign based on either a "conversion funnel" or a "business objective".
The conversion funnel option spends your campaign budget based on a set of priorities that you set. These priorities include customers seeing your ad, customers clicking your ad, and conversions. Yahoo! provides a scale that runs from "Not important" to "High". Specifying an importance level for each priority will cause Yahoo! to adjust bids differently. For example, if your main goal is visibility by displaying your ads to as many people as possible, you would set the "Customer seeing your ad" option to a high priority. If generating conversions at a target cost is your top priority, you would set the campaign conversion priority to high and specify your target conversion cost. You can also set a target return on ad spend as your high priority event.
The business objective optimization option lets you specify the value for a parameter: your target cost per click, cost per conversion, or cost per thousand impressions (CPM). It is very similar to the conversion funnel option but is more straightforward. There is no setting of priorities - just a dollar amount for the most important parameter. If you have conversion tracking in place and know exactly how much you can afford to pay per conversion, or what you can pay to generate the most total conversions at maximum profitability, then you should use the cost per conversion option. Ultimately, that is the most important parameter - what it costs to get a new customer or qualified prospect.
We have found Yahoo!'s campaign optimization feature to work reasonably well once it has run long enough to make the necessary changes. They are definitely worth a try. However, it would be a serious mistake for you to just set it and forget about it. It may be the case that Yahoo! technically does what you told it to do, but it could end up producing the wrong results. For instance, you might specify a target cost per click, which Yahoo! achieves, but it could shrink your total traffic so much that it becomes pointless. So keep an eye on things to make sure that Yahoo! is making adjustments that are going to help you reach your goals.
Yahoo! Search Marketing Blogs
- The Destructive Influence of Yahoo Search Marketing Ad Syndication ...
- I was reading Twitter today and saw Yahoo! Ads Buzz share a link to a Search Engine Watch blog post highlighting trends in paid search. Both Bing and Google keep growing year on year, whereas Yahoo! Search Marketing has just been decimated. ... All I know is, Yahoo's PPC mechanism alone is a total nightmare, so I don't imagine anything else of theirs is clean and streamlined. It's a shame because I've gotten great results for clients with Yahoo's PPC, but dear GOD I hate ...
- Yahoo Web Analytics: Future unclear in Yahoo - Microsoft agreement ...
- With the Microsoft Bing agreement, Yahoo is divesting itself of costly technology and the associated infrastructure: not just the search engine technology, but the search and contextual ad platform as well. .... As I indicated above, I would prefer to see Yahoo! stay committed to Search Marketing ? that of course includes the Yahoo! Web Analytics component. Yet seen from the outside, and as a person who has worked for two multinationals, I cannot help but harbor doubts ...
- 3 New Yahoo! Search Marketing Features That Should Have Happened ...
- Yahoo! Search Marketing pay per click advertising is introducing some new features that Google and MSN adCenter have had for a long time. I say it's about time! The first feature is Demographic Targeting. I like this and I wonder how ...
- Tips On Building A Profitable PPC Campaign
- Some advertising campaigns use ppc marketing, search submission campaign, search engine optimization techniques and a variety of other techniques combined to give a website the most exposure possible. To use pay per click search engine submission to get lots of ... Go to Google and search for your main keyword or you can do the same in Yahoo search. If your site is among the first few that show up in the results, then you Search Engine Optimization campaign is successful. ...
by WorkMedia
Company Bio
Jerry Work was working in Memphis as a financial analyst at one of the top business appraisal firms in the country when he realized he wa... (more)
Jerry Work was working in Memphis as a financial analyst at one of the top business appraisal firms in the country when he realized he wa... (more)
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