By artarmon42 | No Comments
Last updated: Friday, July 13, 2007

For a lot of people who try Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM), their campaign normally starts out well. But over time, the number of impressions/clicks they get seem to decrease. That’s when people start to increase bids (pushing them further into unprofitable territory). Increasing bids is not the answer. The real question is why does the number of impressions decrease? There are primarily 4 reasons why you’re not getting sufficient impressions:

You don’t have enough keywords
You need TENS-of-thousands of keywords. Don’t expect to throw in 1,000 keywords and make money.

Your Quality Socre is too low
Quality Score affects how many impressions YSM will give you. The basic requirements you need to have:

• Your ads need to match words in your keywords. If a keyword doesn’t match any ad for that group, that keyword will get little to no impressions.
• Your ads need to match your landing page. If your landing page’s article doesn’t have any common words in your ad, you will get a low QS.

Your CTR is too low
YSM is pretty dumb when it comes to calculating the quality of your campaign. Besides the basics QS requirements listed above, it moves your QS (up or down) based on your CTR. If you can’t get people to click on your ad, it assume your ad sucks and will lower your QS (and consequently give you less and less impressions). The most common problem is that people don’t tune their campaigns. Leaving bad keywords (with lots of impressions but little clicks) will screw up your whole campaign. Learn how to tune and do it regularly.

You’re bidding too low
There is a school of thought that says you should bid $0.10 for all your keywords. But that technique only works IF you are using really long tail keywords (with little competition) and you tune your campaign. Otherwise, bidding $0.10 on competitive keywords will slaughter your campaign. Because you’ll bid $0.10 for “motorola ringtones”, get 5,000,000 impressions at position 46 (which means while YSM will show it, no one is likely to ever click on it). 0 clicks for 5,000,000 impressions is going to totally tank your entire campaign.

If you’re going to use common (highly competitive) keywords, you need to put in a sufficient bid that’ll get you a high enough position for people to click on. If you can’t afford to bid high enough to be competitive, then delete the keyword. Once again, if you tune, you won’t have this problem.

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