By artarmon42 | 2 Comments
Last updated: Saturday, July 14, 2007

Assuming you’ve been keeping up with your Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) tuning, you should have a pretty tight campaign. But for what seems like a good keyword, you still don’t get anywhere near the number of impressions you’d expect. Luckily, YSM gives you all the data you need to explain the number of impressions you’re getting!

If you go into the adgroup, and click on the keyword, you’ll get something that looks like this:

(click on image to enlarge)

I’ve circled the main things to look at:

• On the left, notice that the bid is $0.10
• Now, pay attention to the shape of the graph on the right. You’ll notice that this highly competitive keyword, has a pretty steep price. You can’t even get a quarter of the possible impressions until your bid exceeds $2.50!
• But at $0.10, my average position is 10.68 (which is not bad… I like to target positions <10, to ensure I’m on the first page of the search results).
• Although the position is not bad, I’m only going to get 324 impressions per month. Broken down into days, I should only expect an average of 10 impressions per day. Hopefully now you understand why you need LOTS of keywords in this game.
• Of that, YSM thinks that I should get an average of 9 clicks. This is from YSM’s stats which is usually far from perfect, but it’s close enough for you to understand the principle. The lower you are in position, your impressions will get a lesser percentage clicked upon.
• In summary at $0.10, I’m getting 1% of the total available clicks.

Let’s see what happens if I bump up my bid:

(click on image to enlarge)

• Even if I bump my bid up 2500% to $2.50, I’ve only increased my average position to 7.27. This is obviously a highly competitive keyword - there are ALOT of people bidding ALOT of money.
• But at this price, I now get 11,833 impressions. Increasing my bid by 25 times, I’ve increased my impressions by 36 times. That’s a good return (assuming you can afford to bid at $2.50!).
• And I’m now getting 17% of the available clicks.

Let’s bump it up one more time:

(click on image to enlarge)

• Bumping it up to $6.02 (6020% increase over the original $0.10 bid) now puts me into a great average position of 1.58.
• I’m now getting 20,350 impressions. By increasing my bid by 60 times, I’ve increased my impressions by 62 times. Unlike the first jump, it’s not as good a return. But the value here is now that I’ve got a higher average position (jumping from position 7 to position 1), which will give me a better CTR (people are more likely to click on the higher position ads).
• And even at $6.02, I’m only getting 89% of available clicks.

Different keywords will give you different shape graphs. But the principles of how to read the data is the same. And through that analysis, you’ll be able troubleshoot and tune your keywords.

Now, you can figure out for yourself, why you’re not getting any impressions

CommentSubscribe

1. Kirk
   January 26, 2008
   
   

   I’m a newbie and soaking up all this free info is great! Thanks very much for taking the time to post this stuff. My first site (www.musicprodeals.com) is only hours old so I’ve got no where to go but up and this info definitely help. I’ll be adding this feed to my iPhone.

   Three questions:

   1. If you had to start over with a limited ad budget would you target one service over another or spread your funds over ysm, ms, and google?
   2. In tackling the learning curve, which would you take on first?
   3. Does the knowledge travel across the services or are they that different.

   Thanks again!
   Kirk

   Leave a reply
2. artarmon42
   January 27, 2008
   
   

   For competitive keywords, YSM is cheapest. And unlike Adowrds, YSM is more forgiving if you mess up and get a horrible CTR (whereas Google might end up black-listing your entire domain). So:

   1) With a limited budget, go with YSM.
   2) Start learning by doing YSM.
   3) They’re different (YSM and Adcenter/MS are probably the cloesst).

   In summary, I’d recommend most people to start with YSM. Once they’ve learnt search marketing techniques and have a positive cash flow, then branch into Google. Google has much more search volume, but be a big money drain until your campaigns gain a good CTR history.

   Leave a reply