PPC-Advice.com

Sexy Yahoo Search Marketing Features

Yahoo is certainly a giant in the search industry, however over the years Google’s David certainly has whopped Yahoo’s Goliath. However, they still remain the number one directory on the web, and have a loyal following. They’ve made great strides by partnering with local ISP’s such as Rogers Cable in Canada, Verizon in the United States, and British Telecom in the UK. And some of the features they offer to online marketers are just plain cool.

Sexy Reports

One thing that sets Yahoo apart from MSN and Google are their built-in reporting apps. Stats and graphs are at your finger tips and are redrawn in real-time. This usually isn’t the case for some of the higher-end paid analytics tools available on the market. To get a rough idea of your campaign successes, stick with Yahoo’s reporting tab, but when making serious changes you should definitely verify numbers with your analytics tool.

Sexy Bidding

Have you ever wished that Google would stop beating around the bush about how your ad will place in Adwords? Without testing your bids and finding out yourself, it’s almost impossible to predict. Yahoo on the other hand, divulges quite a bit more information regarding your placement, impression share, and potential clicks on a nifty little graphical scale.

Yeah so, what’s the big deal, right? The graph tells you a few things: how well your ad will place on average given your bid, how much more it will cost you to place better, and how many more impressions and clicks you will potentially receive. For example, you are prepared to bid $5.00 on a keyword and find that you will be in position 2.3 on average, does it make sense therefore to bid $2.00 more to get position 1.5 on average? That depends on your business model.

Another example: in one of my Yahoo campaigns I found that I had to bid at least $15 for a certain keyword in order to break the 1.9 average position. From the graph, there was a definite plateau for all bids exceeding $8.00, so by bidding under $8.00 I was able to maximize my positioning without sacrificing spend.

Would you pay $100 more to upgrade your Tercel to a Lambourghini Murcielago? Sure you would. But, would you pay $10,000 more to get your Tercel in pearl blue metallic? Probably not.

Not so Sexy

Dayparting is still a very sought after feature missing from Panama.  Hopefully this won’t have to wait until the next major release to be implemented.

Buzzworthy? Bookmark to: