Googloo says Yahoo! Search Marketing – Not So Bad – Really!

During the last few weeks there has been a lot of frustration vented in the direction of Yahoo!Search Marketing (formerly Overture).

Often in the past, when an Overture system upgrade took place it was followed by a period of reduced usability for advertisers. This was usually not too serious and sorted itself out in a few days. Unfortunately, Yahoo! SM’s recent upgrade did not run quite so smoothly. Many advertisers were unable to manage their accounts for several days, and in the case of some advertisers, daily budgets were ignored and ads were run at full throttle.

Yahoo! SM has sent out e-mails apologizing for the problems and has issued credits for over-spending that resulted from daily budgets being inadvertently ignored. I am impressed, not only by the quick response but by how seriously Yahoo! SM is taking the whole situation.

The fact that Yahoo! Search Marketing cares about what its advertisers think is evident not only in this upgrade situation, but in the many things that they have done over the years to make dealing with Yahoo! SM a smooth and rewarding process. From insisting that advertisers run ‘good’ ads that link to ‘relevant’ pages to the clean and straight forward bidding process – Yahoo! SM knows its stuff.

Perhaps I, Googloo, would not be feeling so mellow towards Yahoo! SM if the accounts we manage had been seriously hurt by the upgrade hiccup or if I had not just spent several hours working on Google AdWords – a system that is not as user friendly, especially when it comes to bidding. While Google’s new ‘simplified’ quality-based bidding does have some advantages for some bidders – it still lacks the simple, direct elegance of Yahoo! SM’s current bidding model.

Caveat

Despite my current fondness for Yahoo! Search Marketing we do need to keep in mind:Yahoo! SM has more system upgrades planned for the near future.

"Warnings normally precede upgrades, so take the time to evaluate your site’s risk and adjust accordingly".

Searches Up 3 Percent In July

INDUSTRY WATCHERS EXPECTED THAT SEARCH growth would moderate in the summer, on the theory that consumers spend less time at their computers during the warm weather. But new figures from Nielsen//NetRatings show that U.S. Internet users actually performed more searches last month than in June.

The total number of Web searches in the United States rose last month to 4.454 billion--up nearly 3 percent from 4.327 billion in June, according to data from Nielsen//NetRatings. The data also revealed that individual searchers conducted an average of 37.6 searches last month, up 3.7 percent from 36.2 searches in June.

Still, the growth rate was less impressive than earlier in the year; in the second quarter, users conducted 12.8 billion searches--5 percent more than in the first quarter.

Google once again captured the largest proportion of searches, accounting for 46.2 percent last month--down slightly from 47 percent in June. Yahoo! Search was responsible for 22.5 percent of July searches--up slightly from 22.3 percent in June--while MSN Search accounted for 12.6 percent of searches last month, up marginally from 12.5 percent in June.

Getting Started with the new Google adwords keyword System

A couple of days ago 'Googloo' woke up one morning to find that some or may be even most of keywords were "Inactive", requiring higher bid prices to be reactivated. All thanks to Google! It's deeply appreciated.

Well Mr Googloo tries to explain you, how dose this new system works.

when you start a campaign, Google assign some quality based minimum bids for each and every keyword unlike the older system where you can bid at Rs 3 for all the keyword.

Your Keyword is Active or Inactive depending upon whether your Max CPC (bid) is heigher or lower then Min Bid estimated by Google respectively.

Once your keyword is active, The minimum required quality Bid keeps on changing depending upon the performance of your keyword.Now this is the tricky part, if your keyword is performing your min bid remains at that level or might go down otherwise and in most cases the bid will rise.

For all of you who wants to be a master of SEM, here is the imporatnt tip from 'Googloo' himself. Make sure you optimize your creatives in such a way that your ad creative contains the keyword, that increases the relevency of your ad creative and will give you a better CTR and in turn a lower CPC.