The problem of course is that search is a dynamic industry that requires constant attention and if your campaign is left alone, then it falls behind the market and the competition. Once it gets to this stage of course, the campaign is performing poorly and as a guardian of your own or your client’s budgets, you pull your spend back and decide to push the money back into Google. This is unfortunately the start of a downward spiralling trend and it would be wise to break the cycle.

The industry is crying out for some competition to rival Google and the Search Alliance is a good step forward from Microsoft and Yahoo to try and chip away at some of the market share. However with this now being pushed back, it’s vital to look into what‘s happening with your campaigns and realise that while the models are similar across the engines, there are some key differences that really do make a huge difference once you know how to work them in your favour.

If we take Yahoo as an example there are 3 main things that you need to address first when looking to improve the performance of an account.

1. Duplicates

Yahoo operates a system that maps keywords to a root term in order to make your account more manageable.

For example:

Whilst this may not be an exact example the 5 keywords on the left all essentially mean the same thing and are mapped to a root or “canonical” term on the right.

This means that you only need to have the root term in your account but will still appear for all 5 queries. By definition, the keywords not seen as a root or canonical term are called duplicates and if they are left in an account – will cause internal competition and artificially increase CPC’s. By removing or de-duping the account you can decrease CPC’s and positively improve the performance.

Having duplicates in an account also removes control over which instance of a keyword is actually triggering ads through Yahoo’s ad delivery system so it’s highly recommended to remove them.

Unfortunately this isn’t an external fix but your Yahoo rep is well versed in this issue and will be happy to do the de-duping for you.

2. High Volume Re-structure

Quality Score is king on Google and Yahoo is no different however…. on Google it’s set at keyword level and on Yahoo it’s at ad group. This means that if you have keywords grouped by meaning in the same ad group with high and low search volume – your Quality Score will suffer.

Best practice here is to operate a more granular approach. Separate keywords with high and low volume into separate ad groups – sometimes this means that you will have one keyword per ad group – this is fine, it’s the most effective way to run on Yahoo as you can then attribute Quality Score to that one high performing keyword without others in the same group pulling the performance back down.

Another tip based on this - if you have an ad group with say 100 keywords in with a range of low to high impressions, take the lower volume keywords out and put them in their own ad group thus retaining any history for those keywords with the better performance.

(NB: If your structure is good but you are still seeing a poor Quality score you need to address your copy looking at deep links and custom urls. Tightly align your copy to the ad group theme and think about specific display urls.)

3. Match types and Negative keywords

Yahoo has 2 match types, Standard and Advanced. Standard works along the same lines as Exact match and Advanced incorporates Phrase, Broad and Broad Match Modifier. Advanced match historically received lot of bad press but Yahoo have really worked to get it right in recent years and so it is worth re-visiting again. It might not be the best solution for your account and basing your strategy on Standard match may match your objectives more, but work with Yahoo on the most suitable case for each scenario.

If you are keen to use Advanced match - The key thing to do is to use Excluded keywords (Yahoo’s version of Negative’s). Unlike Google, Yahoo only has one type of Excluded keyword and this only works against Advanced match queries.

You can’t therefore use an Excluded keyword on a Standard match keyword. It’s also worth pointing out here that when you have a keyword on Advanced match you will also show for that query on Standard. With this in mind if you don’t want to appear for a certain search query then take the keyword out of your account

Or as another way of explaining this, Yahoo’s Excluded keywords work in the same way as Google’s negative phrase match.

To work the system effectively - request Advanced Match Reports to identify possible Excluded keywords to refine traffic quality. These are also a great way to expand keywords within your account. Again you will need to request these from your Yahoo rep.

Another handy tip here: Do not upload negative keywords straight from Google across to Yahoo you risk blocking 1000’s of relative queries to your ads due to the differences mentioned above.

If you were to work through these 3 main areas of optimisation, it’s highly likely you would see dramatic improvement to your account in terms of efficiency and performance. The Yahoo team offer all of this as part of their service so it’s also very time efficient to you as an advertiser or agency. They will keep you informed at each stage and can even upload once you are happy. Barriers to this may be tracking implementation but it’s worthwhile spending a little time doing this to gain large rewards on what should by then be an account in good shape. In some cases Yahoo can even help with the implementation.

Lastly - if you have a Google campaign up and running and want to get onto Yahoo quickly, send over a bulksheet download, Yahoo will convert, de-dupe, re-structure and if you want, upload for you once you are happy. This is a fairly simple process and one that is most likely replicated at Bing - one email or call to ask for those 3 things on your account/s…

What are you waiting for?

For the latest information on everything at Yahoo please use the following link:

http://advertisingcentral.yahoo.com/en_GB/news/search-insights

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  29th July 2009