By artarmon42 | 2 Comments
Last updated: Wednesday, July 11, 2007

As I previously posted, CTR is critical for the success of your Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) campaign. To that end, it is important that all new campaigns undergo a “tuning” process. “Tuning” will vary from campaign to campaign, but as a general statement it probably takes 1 hour per day initially, quickly decreasing to less than 5 minutes per day after 1-2 weeks.

I do the following each day (the work decreases to almost nothing within 1-2 weeks). Go through each adgroup (set timeframe from the start of the campaign to present):

1. Sort by clicks. Going through the keywords that received clicks, delete the keywords that don’t make sense.
2.  Sort by impressions. Keywords with >200 impressions without any clicks, get deleted. NOTE: There might be VERY FEW keywords that don’t get clicks because their Ad Position is too low. Don’t delete them for now.
3. Sort by CTR. Keywords with >100 impressions and <2% CTR get deleted. NOTE: There might be VERY FEW keywords that don’t get high CTR because their Ad Position is too low. Don’t delete them for now.

Low CTR ads may be because of bad adcopy or bad keywords. If you’re an experienced marketer who can write good adcopy, then these steps (done every 3 days) may not be necessary:

1.  For each adgroup, delete ads with <2% CTR. You may have to delete ALL ads (especially if you had bad keyword in the group that had alot of impressions without any clicks). Objective - get 2 ads with CTR >= 4%.
2.  Most people can stop here. But I’m obsessive-compulsive, so I keep deleting the lower CTR ad, and try to make ads with a higher CTR.

By the time you get here, your campaign should have been running 2-4 weeks. Now that you have more time (because the major tuning is over), focus on the keywords that didn’t get on your radar for the first few weeks. Keywords with 0 impressions (is it because no one searches for it? or because your bid is too low to even show up?). Keywords with < 200 impressions (need more bid? need to be deleted?). But by now, you should be intimately familiar with tuning process, your campaign and your niche, to be able to make an informed decision on what to do with these keywords.

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