PPC Without Pity

Last week, we continued our series on adjusting PPC campaign settings by looking at how to optimize Yahoo Search Marketing campaign settings. This week picks up where we left off:

Campaign Optimization Guidelines

In this section, you can adjust the settings for Campaign Optimization, if you opted in to this function within the “Campaign Budget and Schedule” section. You can tell Yahoo’s campaign optimization to work toward a certain business objective (clicks, impressions, conversions, or revenue), or try to improve your conversion funnel by assigning relative value to events within your funnel (i.e. a page view, shopping cart addition, or a lead form submission). As I mentioned in Part 1, I’m not very keen on using PPC providers’ account optimization functions since they only have the incentive to get you to spend more money on PPC – they could probably care less about your bottom line. But, if you just don’t have time to manage your PPC account and you’d like to automate the process, this may be a good option for you. But beware – if you set your optimization settings incorrectly, you just might amplify mistakes instead of solve them. Algorithms can run amok if you don’t watch them carefully.

Network Distribution

Here, you’ll be able to change your settings for ad targeting. First, you’ll need to decide whether to adjust your settings at the campaign or ad group level in “Set Level” box. For the purposes of this post, we’ll assume you want to keep the settings on the campaign level.

In the “Network Settings” subsection, you can choose whether you want your search network ads to appear in Yahoo Search (searches on Yahoo.com and Yahoo toolbars), Yahoo Partners (sites that use Yahoo for site search), or both. If you’re just starting out, it’s usually best to opt in to both to judge performance. Once your campaign has run for a little while, you can check back at this setting to see a performance breakdown by network. Then, you can make an informed decision on which network(s) to use.

Next, you’ll want to adjust your targeting. If you just want to reach all of the US (or whatever your home country is) at all times, you can just leave the defaults as-is. But, if you want to get fancy, you can adjust your demographic and geographic targeting, and schedule your ads to show at certain times of day and days of the week.

In the “Demographic Bidding” subsection, you can adjust your keyword bids for specific age and gender groups. For example, if your target audience is women ages 30-45, you can set your bids to be 150% of their normal amount for searches from that particular demographic. You can also block your ads from showing to users age 18 and under on this screen.

Now, keep in mind that web demographics aren’t an exact science. Since you can never really know who is behind the computer doing the searching, accuracy is a huge problem with demographic targeting. Yahoo is just making their best guess at the identity of the user based on if they are signed in with their Yahoo profile, or if they self-reported accurate information. Sometimes you’re relying on third-party data of dubious accuracy. Use demographic targeting if you have a very specific audience in mind, but be aware of its limitations.

Geo-targeting is much more reliable, since search engines can reliably read the IP address of the user making the search. Here, you can set it so that your ads only show in a specific country, state, or metro area. This is really useful if you only offer services at a specific brick-and-mortar location, or if you can only service certain parts of the country. You may also want to experiment with geotargeting if you know your best customers come from a certain part of the country, and you’d rather not waste limited budget dollars getting ad coverage somewhere else. You can even increase your bids in certain geographic areas if you find that certain areas have a more competitive PPC landscape than others.

The last campaign setting to look at is ad scheduling. This is where you can shut off ads during certain days of the week (like over the weekend), or limit ad impressions to certain hours of the day. This is really useful if you need to take orders or leads over the phone, and you only want to show your ads when someone is available to take the call. You can also use this to help stretch your budget, limiting ad coverage to your most profitable hours or days of the week. And, if you want to keep a leg up on the competition, you can even adjust your bids to be higher at certain times to ensure you remain in top positions.

That’s it for Yahoo. Join us next week when we continue our campaign setting optimization series. Next up: MSN AdCenter.

This week, we continue our series on optimizing campaign settings with everyone’s favorite #2 PPC network: Yahoo Search Marketing.

To change your settings on an individual Yahoo Search Marketing campaign, select your campaign on either the Dashboard or Campaigns tab after you log in. On the campaign page, click on the “Campaign Settings” link:

On the settings page, you’ll have a few options. To change the settings in each section, just click on the “edit” link on the top right side of each content box. Here’s what you should pay attention to in each section:

Campaign General Information

Here, you can change your campaign name and add a description to help remind you what’s in it. You can also add the campaign to your watch list to keep updated on potential issues with the campaign. There’s nothing to optimize here – just some helpful labels and alerts.

Campaign Budget and Schedule

This is where you set your campaign budget. You can either set it to “no limit” (BAD idea unless you have some really deep pockets…), or assign a dollar amount as your daily maximum spend. You can even allot a specific budget percentage amount toward content match. This could be really helpful if your content network coverage is eating up your daily budget – you can set it so that content can only spend a certain percentage of your daily budget at maximum. To help you decide on a budget, Yahoo even has a tool on this settings page to help you estimate your share of clicks, based on your keyword selections and budget amount.

You can also set a specific end date for your campaign on this page. This is helpful for seasonal campaigns (like back-to-school or Christmas), or if you just want to end your campaign at a specific date and you know you’ll forget to turn it off yourself.

In this section, you also have the choice to opt-in to Campaign Optimization. Personally, I’ve never been a fan of letting a PPC provider automate your account for you. Most optimization is done to optimize traffic instead of conversions (however, Yahoo does allow you the option to choose whether campaign optimization works toward traffic or conversions – more on this in Part 2). This means that the PPC provider has an incentive to increase your clicks (they make more money), but doesn’t have an incentive to make your account have a better ROI (which usually means you will have fewer clicks). Use Campaign Optimization at your own risk. It may be helpful for people who just don’t have time to manage their PPC account. But, with a basic knowledge of PPC (like the great stuff you get from this blog), you can probably outperform Yahoo’s “optimization” algorithm with just a little hard work and creative strategy.

Tactic Settings

Here, you get to make some important choices about your ad distribution. You can choose to turn Sponsored Search (Yahoo search and sites that use Yahoo for site search purposes) and Content Match (sites opted in to Yahoo display and text ads, like blogs and other content partners) off or on. Like in any other account, it’s best to have separate campaigns for search network and content network. The strategies for success are so different in each one that it’s much easier in the long run to divide up the two.

You also need to make a choice about your keyword match types. Unlike Google and MSN, match types are set on the account and campaign level instead of the keyword level. I cannot stress enough how much this sucks. Sure, you can actually set the match type at the keyword level, but the setting gets overridden by what’s on the Account or Campaign level. You’re going to have to commit to one of Yahoo’s two match types:

Advanced – Roughly equivalent to “broad” match in Google and MSN. Shows ads on search queries that are somewhat relevant to the keyword you’re actually bidding on.

Standard – Very close to (but not quite) “exact” match. Shows ads only when a user types in a query that is equal to, or a plural of, a keyword that you are bidding on.

Which keyword you select depends a lot on your available budget and your desired traffic strategy. If you want a lot of traffic and you don’t mind the occasional unqualified click, Advanced match will do. If you’re on a tight budget, and you want absolute control over your keyword list at the expense of a large amount of traffic, try Standard. My personal preference is to use Standard with a very expansive keyword list, but then again I usually like to err on the side of positive ROI over excessive traffic.

If you do opt for Advanced match, you’ll need to pay attention to the next setting: Excluded Keywords. You may know these by their non-crazy-person name in Google and MSN: negative keywords. These work the same way as in every other account. You put them in, and any search query that contains the negative…er…”excluded” keywords won’t show your ads and waste your precious budget. To find appropriate negative keywords, you can ask your Yahoo rep to run a search query report for you (you can’t do this yourself, unfortunately). Also unfortunate is the fact that they can only go back a few weeks for search queries, and they won’t be able to tell you which queries are driving conversions. This leaves you two options: 1) pull some negative keywords from your Google account, or 2) review search queries for Yahoo PPC in Google Analytics or any other analytics package you’re using.

That’s it for this week. Stay tuned next week for Yahoo: Part 2, and the following weeks for our final installment of this campaign settings optimization series, covering MSN AdCenter.

This just in from the “I thought they had this already” department: Microsoft announces full HTML mobile device targeting for their AdCenter PPC marketing platform. Sure, Microsoft AdCenter has been in the mobile ad game for a while now, but did it really take them this long to work it out so that you can specifically target smartphone devices with full web browsers like the iPhone, Google’s Nexus One, or any number of other Palm and Android phones? Actually, they did have this capability previously, but you had to individually target each type of mobile device. At least now you can target to the general category of mobile devices, which should save you a lot of time.

Regardless of my snarky commentary, this is great news for any advertiser trying to make mobile-targeted PPC campaigns in 2010. Clearly, Google and MSN are betting big on mobile PPC marketing in 2010. Yahoo, not so much. I’m not aware of any ways to target mobile devices in Yahoo (feel free to prove me wrong in the comments!), but we’ve seen a lot of developments lately from Google and Microsoft. I’m still not totally convinced that users are going to be on board with mobile PPC just yet. I don’t think that people are ready to be advertised to on their mobile devices – it seems like a little too intimate of a medium to me. We’ll see if my cynicism is justified by the end of the year.

Either way, now would be a good time to make sure you have mobile-specific landing pages, and optimize a mobile version of your homepage for tiny smartphone screens. Whether you’re ready or not, people are going to start looking for information about your company on their mobile phones. It’s better to have a mobile version of your site ready to go and no one using it than having to scramble to make one once you see your mobile traffic take off in your web analytics program.

Yahoo recently announced some new functionality in their PPC platform. One of the new features was improved ability to import Google AdWords campaigns into Yahoo Search Marketing format. Now, I like the ability to cross-post campaigns as much as the next PPC marketer, but announcements like this just make me feel like Yahoo is constantly admitting defeat in their PPC platform.

I should preface this by saying that you can also import AdWords campaigns into MSN AdCenter, although you do need to take a side trip into Microsoft Excel to get it done. At least you have to use another Microsoft product. Yahoo just seems to be rolling over and admitting that there are much better tools for creating PPC campaigns out there, and you should probably just use those instead of the Yahoo Search Marketing platform.

I assume that most of the people reading this blog have created a Yahoo PPC campaign before. And you would probably agree with me that making changes to a Yahoo account are pretty tedious and boring. Compared to the agility and ease of use of AdWords Editor (or for that matter, the AdCenter Desktop Beta), Yahoo is light years behind the competition in terms of useful tools for large-scale PPC accounts.

So instead of creating a tool of their own, Yahoo decided to take the easy route and just assume that you are using their competitors tools (which you probably are) and outsource their PPC tool creation to the other guys. I admit that Google has some pretty awesome tools for PPC, but I hardly think that’s an excuse for just rolling over and giving up, especially if you’re one of the web’s largest companies. I guess I can’t really blame Yahoo for phoning it in, though, since their PPC platform is probably on the outs, pending the upcoming Yahoo/Bing merger.

If you are still interested in importing AdWords accounts into Yahoo, you can find instructions here. In the future, I’d recommend having a Google AdWords export handy for all of your PPC campaigns, since it seems like it has become the gold standard for pay per click accounts. I doubt that any of the other providers will be taking away their AdWords import abilities any time soon.