Adding to my previous list of video games, here is a list of all (recent) DVD releases (new movies and shows). The list of 568 titles has been compiled over the past month.

List of all recent DVD releases (movies & shows)

I pull this information automatically on a daily basis. So whenever a new song enters the charts, I know about it! If you find this list useful, please post a comment. If i get enough interest, I’ll publish the updates.

Last week, I compiled a list of all video games (games for video consoles) on the market right now. The list of 9,204 titles is broken down into various game consoles. A saavy webmaster or affiliate marketer should have lots of uses for information like this, so enjoy

List of games for all major video game consoles

I pull this information automatically on a daily basis. So if a new game comes up, I know about it! If you find this list useful, please post a comment. If i get enough interest, I’ll publish the updates.

Stay tuned, as I will be publishing the list of all hits in the Billboard charts in the next few days. That should be especially useful for those doing ringtones

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

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.

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.