In China, many Chinese advertisers do not have:

• The “know-how” to do Yahoo search engine marketing outside of China.
• The time to manage their own Yahoo PPC accounts.
• The language skills to create keyword lists and ads to succeed with Yahoo PPC.

Unofficial Yahoo.com PPC Pricing

Some Chinese advertising agencies (unofficial Yahoo.com reseller) take opportunities and offer help to Chinese advertisers for marketing websites on Yahoo.com.

In this example, the ad agency insists:

• Your ads are assured to appear on Yahoo.com’s first search engine results page.
• The pricing model is subject to change due to other advertisers’ competitions.

The pricing structures focus on search traffic impressions, but do not ensure delivering any clicks to your site. This advertising agency will:

• Rank your highest search traffic and highly competitive keywords between Yahoo sponsored ad positions 1 and 11, from RMB 5,000 per keyword per year, with monthly search impressions greater than 100,000.
• Rank your high search traffic keywords between Yahoo sponsored ad positions 1 and 4, from RMB 6,000 per keyword per year, with monthly search impressions between 30,000 and 100,000.
• Rank your high search traffic keywords between Yahoo sponsored ad positions 5 and 11, from RMB 3,000 per keyword per year, with monthly search impressions between 30,000 and 100,000.
• Rank your medium search traffic keywords between Yahoo sponsored ad positions 1 and 4, from RMB 3,000 per keyword per year, with monthly search impressions between 3,000 and 30,000.
• Rank your medium search traffic keywords between Yahoo sponsored ad positions 5 and 11, from RMB 1,500 per keyword per year, with monthly search impressions between 3,000 and 30,000.
• Rank your low search traffic keywords between Yahoo sponsored ad positions 1 and 11, from RMB 500 – 1,500 per keyword per year, with monthly search impressions less than 3,000.

Problems Buying Yahoo.com Search Impressions

As a Yahoo PPC advertiser, the problem with this impression-guaranteed model is that:

• You are buying impressions that do not necessarily convert into visitors to your site.
• The marketing budget you spend on Yahoo PPC is not based on conversions (or performance).
• You are not optimizing your Yahoo PPC marketing budgets for maximum ROI.
• You may be over-paying this ad agency.

Yahoo Search Marketing (PPC) Optimization

To maximize the ROI from your marketing budgets on Yahoo PPC:

• Create the Yahoo PPC global strategies that fit your goals.
• Follow Yahoo PPC optimization tips.
• Hire professional PPC marketing specialists to manage/optimize your Yahoo PPC and minimize your Yahoo Search Marketing problems.
• Hire professional copywriters to do PPC ad copy writing.
• Avoid Yahoo PPC automatic account optimization.
• Use Yahoo Search Marketing conversion tracking to monitor and review your sales.

Dear Advertiser,

In this economic climate, we understand that you need to stretch your marketing budget as far as possible. So we thought you’d want to know about some changes that we hope will help lower your costs and increase your clicks.

Given that certain business categories have been impacted by the current economic conditions, we’ve reviewed minimum bid amounts on a large number of Sponsored Search keywords and reduced the minimum bids on many terms. This review process is a part of our ongoing efforts to optimize our search marketplace.

Some of these changes to minimum bids have already taken place. Please log in and review your account, as you may find that a number of your keyword bids that used to be below the minimum requirement may now be active if their minimum bids have been lowered. These keywords will automatically reactivate (and start displaying your ads), so make sure that your spending limits allow for additional traffic.

We appreciate your business and encourage you to continue to invest in Yahoo! advertising.

Sincerely,

Your Partners at Yahoo! Search Marketing

This time, the reduction of minimum CPCs across many inactive keywords has nothing to do with the quality of ads or keywords (aka YSM’s Quality Index). Therefore, this change does nothing good to improve Yahoo’s ad quality and is moving quite the opposite direction of what Google Adwords has been doing to improve Quality Score of keywords and ads.

Because of this change, you may have many low quality ads and keywords re-appearing on Yahoo. To control your budgets and the quality of clicks you will be receiving, you should immediately review your previously inactivated keywords that have been re-activated by Yahoo.

Previously, PPC Hero also received tons of alerts from Yahoo about the roll-out of this massive change all at once.

How other blogs talked about Yahoo Search Marketing’s keyword minimum bid decrease:

• Yahoo lowering minimum bids on keywords

OPTIMIZATION. In the U.S. only, for those advertisers not bound by an Insertion Order, we may help you optimize your account(s). Accordingly, you expressly agree that we may also: (i) create ads, (ii) add and/or remove keywords, and/or (iii) optimize your account(s). We will notify you via email of such changes made to your account(s), and can also include a spreadsheet of such changes upon your written request. If you would like any of such changes reversed, please reply to such email within 14 days of the change(s), and we will make commercially reasonable efforts to reverse the change(s) you specifically identify. Notwithstanding the foregoing, you remain responsible for all changes made to your account(s), including all click charges incurred prior to any reversions being made. It is your responsibility to monitor your account(s) and to ensure that your account settings are consistent with your business objectives.

Note that in the program terms, Yahoo can legally make changes to your account without your prior approval. For about a month, this raised some concerns from about every SEM expert.

• Why did Yahoo make Automatic Account Optimization an opt-out option, rather than an opt-in option?
• I know the changes are reversible, but why is Yahoo wasting my time for reviewing changes that I may not even agree?
• How would Yahoo know my business / website goals?
• Before creating ads and adding keywords for me, what conversion data does Yahoo use?
• How would Yahoo know how to create tracking codes for the new keywords they are adding to my account?
• By helping me to spend more (in blind), is Yahoo helping me with my business goals, or helping themselves to make more money out of me (quicker)?
• Will Yahoo eventually roll this out to all advertisers who are on Insertion Order terms?
• Will Yahoo eventually roll this out to all YSM accounts that are outside of the United States?

Then, Yahoo defended the Automatic Account Optimization with this response.

• Since June 2008, we have optimized approximately 2% of all active accounts and created approximately 20,000 new ads.
• The acceptance rate of changes we have made is roughly 80%, which we believe indicates the changes have been helpful.
• The time needed to make optimization changes to accounts has been reduced from approximately ten days to one day.

Not everyone wants Yahoo to spend their marketing budget, and it is always easier to get help from one of the PPC experts:

• To look after your Yahoo accounts
• To train you on how to manage and optimize your yahoo campaigns

The reasons are simple:

• You understand your business / website goals
• You understand how to track the performance of your keywords
• You know what products you want to sell, and what products make you the most revenue
• Once you can do it yourself, or your account has been taken care by some experts you can trust, then you can really focus on the important parts of your business

So for YSM advertisers who do not want Yahoo to make any unexpected changes in your new accounts, opt-out of automatic account optimization immediately!

How other blogs talked about Yahoo’s automatic account optimization:

• Has Yahoo Search Marketing Lost Their Minds – SEO Book
• Yahoo Tries to Justify Automatic Account Optimization – Search Engine Land
• Yahoo Tries to Defend Account “Optimizations” – Search Engine Watch
• Yahoo Now Can Change Advertiser Search Marketing Campaigns – Search Engine Journal
• Why I’ve Never Been More Embarrassed for Yahoo – Marketing Pilgrim
• Yahoo is Stealing Your Money – Marketing Don

You block a domain (site) as you may not want to:

• Show your Yahoo PPC ads on your competitors’ sites or websites that talk about your site’s products or services negatively.
• Receive clicks from certain web sites (domains) that may have been consistently sending low quality traffic to your site, according to your web analytics.

Your Sponsored Search and Content Match ads can be displayed outside of Yahoo.com and other areas of Yahoo! They can appear throughout our partner distribution network. The Blocked Domains feature lets you specify websites or sections of a website in our partner distribution network where you don’t want your ads to appear.

A new feature allows you to specify websites or sections of websites in our partner distribution network on which you don’t want your ads to appear. These can be:

• An entire domain (i.e., example.net)
• One subdomain (i.e., blog.example.net)
• Up to two directories in a particular domain (e.g., example.net/directory)

Yahoo Panama still does not have the capability to allow blocking of IP addresses. While Google Adwords allows blocking of unlimited number of domains (or sites) and IPs.

Starting with a single country before replicating

Whether you are starting a keyword list from scratch or migrating the keyword list from your Adwords campaigns, start by launching search-targeted campaigns in the country that can deliver the most traffic to your website. This will allow you to test Yahoo Search Marketing’s platform thoroughly and quickly. For many industries, start with a Yahoo US account should usually ensure high traffic quality and volume for an initial test. If you are not sure, and you already have campaigns running on Adwords, study the performance of your Adwords campaigns and choose the best performed country to start.

Once the ROI of the campaigns in your first Panama account is stabilized, it is time to replicate the campaigns across to other English-speaking country accounts: UK, Australia and India.

Copywriting of localized ads

Having professional PPC copywriters to create and maintain your text ads is important, as Yahoo Pamana allows the testing of multiple text ads in a single ad group (or for a few keywords) simultaneously.

On top of that, slang, accents and spelling variations differ from countries to countries, even when all the countries mentioned above (US, UK, Australia and India) all share the same language.

From time to time, each country’s major current events may differ significantly. Writing the exact copy for the exact events will certainly improve CTR with conversions.

Tracking and Reporting

Track your campaign ROI (or just conversions) with the built-in Conversion Analytics by enabling it in your Panama account. This will allow you to figure out which countries work better than others, and then you can shift your marketing budgets towards the higher performing Yahoo accounts.

Geo-targeting non-English speaking countries

If you are to try the non-English Yahoo accounts or countries, it is best that you have a website in that country’s official language. For example, it can never provide a good user experience to geo-target France by using French keywords, French text ad copy, but an English web site.

With PPC being a great channel for both new lead generation and high volume of sales drive, many international businesses are considering the implementation of global PPC strategies on Yahoo is as essential as on Google Adwords. However, the Panama system has major issues that have been upsetting advertisers with global marketing strategies.

Inefficiency to Scale Up Volume

Experienced PPC advertisers all understand that it requires considerably more time in launching new global campaigns on Yahoo Search Marketing than on Adwords, mainly due to Yahoo Panama’s country-based platform.

You have to create a Panama account for each country you target, even the countries all shared the same language, say English. This means the US campaign you set up in your US account will not be shown to UK audience through the Yahoo UK search engine or its UK search partner sites. Essentially for each country, you will have to set up campaigns separately. This will involve a lot of efforts in cloning your existing campaigns across different accounts.

Scaling up campaigns globally (or across multiple countries with the same language) via the Panama system is considered extremely time-consuming for many PPC advertisers. They would prefer to spend their efforts on Adwords in expanding into new campaigns and refining existing campaigns.

Poor Market Research Tool

It can be worse for advertisers who are more adapted in using Adwords, when they are used to start with the “target-all” strategy. Some PPC experts use Adwords as a great market research tool to get a good overall global view of their industries. Once they have discovered exactly where their marketing budget should be spent, they shift towards the areas where the best ROI can be obtained.

Panama is never an efficient or effective market research tool, as it lacks efficient scalability. Yahoo has never been and will not be able to leverage the marketing expenditure from this area, comparing to Google.

Complications on Campaign Maintenance

Google is way leading in the area of efficient campaign setup and maintenance with its self-developed campaign management tool, Adwords Editor. Yahoo Panama relies on a single-page spreadsheet template for the same purpose.

Panama’s spreadsheet template consists of 34 columns including settings of information for campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads. With 4 different types of rows (for campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords) in the mix, the high level of data manipulation makes the maintenance become a mistake-prone task.

Complicated Financial System

Yahoo advertisers who are on the pre-paid option have to fund each one of the regional Panama accounts with his credit card. Those on the post-paid option will have to prepare for insertion orders and work with invoicing per account.

Advertising across different countries also means an advertiser will be billed in different currencies when it comes to Panama accounts of different countries. The US account will be billed in US dollar, while the UK account will be charged in British Pound Sterling. Also with all the different currencies, it adds difficulties to reconcile marketing cost.

Inflexible Reporting System

Yahoo Panama provides users 7 major reports below. However, each of the reports lacks flexibility. For instance with the keyword performance report, you will not be able to only extract performance of keywords for a specific ad groups (or a few selected adgroups).

• Performance Summary
• Ad Performance
• Daily Performance
• Keyword Performance
• Performance by Geographic Location
• Daily Spending Performance
• URL Performance

Final Words

For Yahoo to prevent Google from pulling away in paid search, it has to improve Panama in many areas listed above. For related topics, you may also want to re-visit my previous post about the importance of versatile PPC platforms.

Starting in the next several weeks, the minimum bids for a number of Sponsored Search keywords will no longer be fixed at $.10. Your new minimum bids can be lower or higher than $.10. Content Match minimum bids currently will remain at $.10.

The amount set as your minimum bid on a keyword in Sponsored Search can vary depending on multiple factors, such as:

• The relevance of your keywords (as measured by the quality of the ads associated with them)
• The number of bidders and bid amounts in the particular keyword market.

The changes are starting any time from now to the next several weeks, and below is what you will need to watch out for:

• Since the minimum CPC of certain keywords will automatically be increased by the Yahoo Panama system due to low relevance, you should start double-checking the maximum CPC of your keywords across your account to ensure they are active for search.
• If the new minimum bids are higher than your expectations, improve the ad quality by making changes to your text ads.
• Set separate keyword maximum CPC for your content-targeted campaigns and for your search-targeted campaigns.

Yahoo Search Marketing first introduced the quality-based pricing in the middle of 2007, but only until now this technology is reflected on keyword minimum CPC. I believe one of the reasons is to reduce the frequency of regularly refunding to advertisers due to low quality clicks received.

Here’s some great news for you: You saved [$**] with us from [Date] to [Date] in your account as a result of our pricing discounts.

What are the discounts that I’m receiving on my click charges? When you are charged for clicks from our partner sites, we may factor in the quality of that traffic. From [Date] to [Date], you were charged less for certain clicks based on our assessment of the quality of traffic delivered by those sites.

Interesting tough, Yahoo also provided some ideas on how I could spend the refunded credits on Panama.

You have an opportunity to drive more traffic by reinvesting these savings. Here are a few ideas:

• You can boost your exposure to customers by adding new keywords or ad groups.
• You can increase your bids on previously unaffordable keywords.
• You can make your business visible in more places by using new tactics
• and channels, such as the Advanced match type or Product Submit.

Another email of similar nature is the one below. This time the source of traffic was from Yahoo Panama’s contextual network partners (aka Content Match). This credit refund is believed rather to be in-line with the quality-based pricing that has been implemented in mid 2007.

Our systems experienced an unexpected technical issue that caused a limited number of Content Match clicks to be priced higher than we intended. As a result, we have credited your account [*number*] in the amount of $[**].

To protect the integrity of our systems, we unfortunately cannot provide you with more specific details associated with this issue. However we want to assure you that we have identified and corrected this issue.

Your credit should now be reflected in your account balance. You can see this adjustment by viewing the Billing Transaction Detail Report within the Reports section of your account.

You may also want to review my previous post about the ways to spot PPC click fraud on your own.

Account Notification: Analytics data for account [*Number*] has not been received since [**Time and Date**] and analytics settings have been deactivated at this time. To restart the recording of analytics data, contact your company’s account administrator to verify your analytics settings, check the tags on your web site(s), and then reactivate analytics in the Analytics Settings page.

Analytics was first being mentioned on the YSM Blog in May 2007. It is created for the advertisers who do not have their own in-house tracking technologies but still want to track the ROI of their campaigns.

Here is the definition of Yahoo Search Marketing’s Analytics:

Analytics

A feature that allows you to understand a wide range of activity related to your website and your online marketing activities. Yahoo! offers two analytics options. Using analytics provides you with information to help optimize your Sponsored Search and Content Match campaigns, as well as your other online marketing activities, to best meet your business goals.

The 2 tracking options provided by the Panama platform when using Analytics are Full Analytics and Conversions Only Analytics.

Full Analytics

An option that allows you to track a full range of activity across your site, including how customers found your site, their browsing activity once they landed on your site, and which online marketing activities (from Yahoo! as well as other providers) are performing best.

Conversions Only

An option that allows you to track conversions and revenue on your site generated from your Sponsored Search and Content Match ads.

Simply by choosing to use the Conversions Only option, Conversions, Revenues, CPA and ROAS can be tracked. Additionally, you will be able to track Assists in which its definition is shown below.

Assists

The number of times a keyword or ad contributed to a conversion that was credited to another keyword or marketing activity. Assists must occur within 45 days of the conversion event to be recorded. Within any 45 day period, a conversion event can have a maximum of 30 assists recorded.

Being able to see Assists means that you get additional keyword data which will help you in better optimizing your campaigns on the keyword level.

The Tune-up feature works on the campaign level and works better when you have collected more campaign history.

You can choose to optimize one of the 4 metrics: Impressions, Clicks, Conversions and Revenue. The feature will only be able to tune up Conversions or Revenue when you have activated Analytics tracking and implemented Analytics tracking codes on your website.

It may not be able to tune up your content match bids at all.

You will be given a proposal within 48 hours after you asked for a Tune-up and you have the option not to accept the proposal. The proposal will contain a list of newly proposed keyword Max CPC (alongside their current Max CPC), the estimated number of impressions and clicks, and the estimated average CPC.

For those keywords that do not have history (or enough history), the Tune-up feature will usually ask you to raise their Max CPC. Sometimes, you can be given strange suggestions like pushing up Max CPC considerably on your high traffic but less-targeted keywords.

In short, Yahoo Panama Tune-up is a tool to improve the performance of your campaigns by allowing you to quickly make bulk Max CPC changes (without you paying much attention to details). However, the suggestions may not be 100% accuarate.

Also, if you are an online retailer already (who sells online and gets paid via Paypal), starting in May 2008 you will be given $100 free credit towards your Yahoo! Panama account.

This is an obvious strategy of Yahoo! Search Marketing and Paypal (eBay) to get ahead of the competition (aka the Adwords and Checkout combo by Google).

Ad testing can be quite an important strategy in PPC marketing. The more relevant the adcopy, the better chance it receives more clicks. This has a positive impact to improve the click-through-rate (CTR) and the quality score of an ad (or the keywords of the adgroup).

Write and Test Multiple Ads

Ever since the first day of the Panama launch, it has been allowing the rotation of 20 unique ads per adgroup. One of the recent improvements regarding ad testing is the ability for advertisers to create as many as 20 different ads on one screen of the Panama interface. This means within the user interface, you will no longer have to create only one ad at a time.

Ad Generator and Optimization

If you want to test more than 20 ads in the same adgroup, you will have to however use the new feature Ad Generator. The improved parts of Ad Generator are its abilities to delete bad ads and store additional ads on deck. With Ad Generator you are still allowed to rotate a maximum of 20 ads at a time, but anything over 20 they will be placed in the storage area. When an ad in the 20 is deleted due to bad performance, one of the ads in the storage area will replace it.

The Ad Generator saves the candidate ads in a pending area–outside of the ad group–where you can view and remove candidates you don’t like. Ad optimisation functionality then moves the remaining candidate ads into your ad group, where it compares ad performance–it keeps the ads that perform the best and deletes the others.

• Submit requests for click fraud investigation
• Install and use Yahoo! Panama’s Conversion Tracking (or Conversion-only Analytics)
• Enable and interpret Yahoo Panama’s Tracking URLs
• Opt-in or opt-out international traffic

Previously when you had to re-organize your campaign, Yahoo Panama only allowed you to move or copy an entire adgroup to a different campaign.

I believe this feature is introduced due to popular demand of its advertisers. Many advertisers who used Overture and upgraded to Panama from the old platform had horrible experiences. This is what usually happened once you hit the upgrade button of your accounts: In the old system, keywords that were grouped by labels (or categories) of 20 characters or less which had slightly different adcopy. Once they were migrated to the new system, those keywords were distributed into multiple adgroups with grouping conventions which made no logical sense. This only caused managing of keywords absolutely difficult. The only way to re-group your keywords in some logical ways again was to actually delete the keywords and then re-add them.

Remember, moving your keywords with the new feature will cause your keyword history (CTR, etc) to be permanently lost, as Panama will treat them as new keywords.

Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers were used to be charged the same for clicks for all traffic partners / websites of Yahoo!. With quality-based pricing, advertisers may be charged less for some clicks based on the quality of the clicks.

We’ll evaluate the quality of traffic from our distribution partners’ sites. Your click charges can be discounted based on the value of that traffic. Discounts will automatically be applied to your account. “Quality” is calculated based on conversion rates and other measurements of the ability to deliver more interested and valuable customers to you from particular distribution partner sites.

As advertisers are getting discounts, obviously certain publishers on Yahoo! Publisher Network that have been sending lower-quality clicks will have their profit margins reduced. With this move I believe Yahoo! is making efforts in encouraging its advertisers to spend more on its content network, in which the traffic quality is still much lower than its search network. Interestingly though, Yahoo! insisted that the new quality-based pricing mechanism will affect both the Search and Content Networks.

Back in 2004, a similar pricing mechanism called smart-pricing was introduced on Google’s Adwords (advertising program) and Adsense (ad publishing program), allowing advertisers to pay less on lower-quality clicks. Since then, there have been many instances that Google tried to combat search arbitrage (or Adsense-made websites).