If you do PPC (Pay Per Click) Internet Marketing, you’ll appreciate!

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.

Sorry this is not a beginners guide to Yahoo Search Marketing. It presumes understanding of basic search advertising concepts and familiarity with Yahoo’s ad network

Since Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) moved to the Panama interface, a lot of people are unclear as to how to setup a successful campaign. While YSM is now more like Google Adword, it is still unique with its own quirks.

But here are some important facets of the new YSM engine:

• Like Google, Click Through Rate (CTR) is important. The higher your CTR, the better Quality Score (QS) you’ll get. The better the QS, the more impressions you’ll get with higher positions.
• Unlike Google, QS seems to be calculated one-time (when your campaign first starts). It doesn’t seem like the YSM-bot comes back to check the site ever again. Or if does, it doesn’t seem to impact the QS ever again.
• After campaign startup, QS seems to be almost 100% based on CTR. Good CTR, QS goes up. Bad CTR, QS goes down.

The secret of success on Yahoo seems to be entirely based on setting up your campaign up correctly so that you’ll get good CTR so that QS will go up naturally over time.

Some basic concepts behind my technique:

• The adgroup’s ad must be relevant to your keyword(s). If YSM deems that there is no relevance, that keyword won’t trigger any/many impressions for that ad .

Solution: Grouping (keywords with common words) is critical and mandatory for success. By grouping, you’ll make sure that every keyword in that adgroup has at least one common word. Then it’s as simple as making sure that those specific word(s) occurs in your adcopy. If you can get two (or more) common words, even better for your QS.
Caveat: It’s widely recognized that Keyword Replacement does NOT help ad relevancy scoring. Just because you throw in a {KEYWORD} into your ad, doesn’t mean you’ll get any quality benefit. If you’re grouping keywords, type the specific word(s) into your adcopy in rather than using {KEYWORD}.

• Irrelevant keywords (even with good CTR) will hurt your bottom line

We all know that irrelevant keywords simply cost you money (if they’re clicked on) or lower your CTR (if they’re not clicked on).
Solution: If you spend time to delete irrelevant keywords (during the campaign building phase), you’ll lose less money. AND (definitely) more importantly, you won’t take that initial hit to your CTR.

• Bids affect ad position, which affects CTR.
  • highly competitive keywords will damage your CTR (you’ll get impressions, but they’ll be really bad positions, so you’ll never get any clicks).
  • you can’t detect/delete these highly competitive keywords during the pre-campaign phase (see point above) because you don’t know which ones are competitive until your campaign starts
  • you are unlikely to want to delete them, because the keyword looks legitimate to you and most people will rather write it off as “bad luck” and keep it in the campaign (where it will continue to hurt your CTR)

There is a theory that says you should start bidding at $0.10 for all keywords (and raise them over time). While it “nearly” guarantees immediate profitability, it results in a campaign that cannot sustain itself over the long run. Its lifespan is limited simply because:

As long as those bad keywords exists in your campaign, lowering your CTR and QS. With a low QS, YSM will give you less and less impressions until you give up the niche as unprofitable.
Solution: You need to bid high enough to score a good position for as many keywords as possible.

So now that you understand the premise of the technique, this is the simple step-by-step for implementing it:

1. Group your keywords. Try to group by finding AT LEAST one common word. Then ensure that ALL the common word(s) are in each ad for that adgroup. With this technique, you should only need 1 ad, per adgroup. You can run more ads if you’re doing split testing, but 1 ad should be all you need.
2. Talk to your Affiliate Manager, and find out what the eCPC for your offer is. Set your bid for ALL your keywords to be ONE-THIRD of that eCPC. This should give you enough margin to make some mistakes (and still eek out a profit).
3. Make sure EVERYTHING in the campaign is approved before turning it on. Yes, EVERY adcopy, EVERY keyword.
4. Set your campaign’s daily spending limit to be 20 times your bid setting. So if you bid $0.20, then your spending limit will be $4.00.
5. Start the campaign and come back to it once your daily limit has been reached (probably 1-2 hours for most niches I can think of). Review EVERY adgroup in the campaign (sort by impressions) to see if you have any crazy-high impressions. If they don’t make sense, or are obviously not targeted, delete them straight away.
6. Reset your daily spending limit to something you’re comfortable with. Resume campaign.
7. On a daily basis (until the campaign has been “stabilized”), do the following:
   • If a keyword has low CTR, look at the Average Position. If the position is >10, then decide whether you are willing to bid more. If you won’t increase your bid, then delete that keyword.
   • Obviously if the position is <10, and it still has a CTR, then it’s an un-targeted keyword (delete it) or your adcopy is bad (fix it).

So does this technique really work?

I have a campaign that has:

• 80k keywords
• I got my first 5-out-of-5 bars QS after 1 week. All adgroups were 5-out-of-5 bars within 1 month of the campaign setup
• When it first started, this campaign’s daily charges were just over $100. I now pay over $1k per day, because that’s how much my impressions/clicks have increased.

You decide for yourself