SEM Punch

Yahoo bugs deactivate advertiser accounts - Google laughs

flo6790 — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 02:13:13 +0000

Just as I thought my Yahoo experience couldn’t get worse, an even more ridiculous thing happened to me yesterday - my entire Yahoo account was put offline and traffic stopped. I simply got the follwoing message in my account:

The account sempunch.com [my account number] is not displaying ads as of 2/5/07 2:04 PM. This may be because the account has reached its daily spending limit, its balance has been depleted, or your company’s account administrator has set the account status to off.

I checked my account balance, but had sufficient funds to last me for a while. I also didn’t have any budget caps. So I call up Yahoo customer support to ask what the hell is going on.

It turns out a system glitch due to a bulk submission I’ve made turned off the account, but now comes the best…Customer support cannot turn the account back on. Supposedly it is a known bug on the new Panama platform and a ticket had to be submitted to the tech group, who I was told would “get to this matter as soon as they can.” Great - here I am loosing out on a couple of thousand visitors per day and someone over at Yahoo needs to manually flip a switch to get my account back online. That person is probably swamped with emails just to flip switches.

How many people has this happened to on Google’s platform? How many on MSN’s? What about dinky-dog-search.com? No wonder Google dominates this market - their #1 competitor in the space is utterly incompetent.

I just hope Yahoo has enough hamsters spinning the wheels to keep the servers going.

UPDATE: I was just told that my account cannot be brought back online and is lost - so be careful about using the bulk upload tool!

Bookmark to:

Yahoo refuses to take advertiser money

flo6790 — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 05:17:57 +0000

I have been following the most recent “rumors” of change at Yahoo with some skepticism. After Brad Garlinghouse’s internal memo, Yahoo announced a radical reorganization, which is supposed to turn the sinking ship around. It is rumored that up to 20% of its workforrce might be layed off - this means roughly 2,000 people lose their job.

For long I have been a big fan of Yahoo search, but not because of the old Overture platform. I hardly had to deal with the account interface, but managed campaigns through the old DTC-XML API. The reason I liked Yahoo was that the account team went above and beyond to help grow the campaigns. They were willing to work on things I hadn’t even asked them for (and didn’t want them to work on, actually) - they were willing to rewrite all creatives for the account, as an example. Well, this was when spend was north of $1 million per month.

I quickly had to learn that Yahoo can be a little tricky to deal with if you spend a few dollars less. Since I left Nextag & Adteractive and began my own search campaigns, I found myself all the sudden starting out from scratch in terms of managed spend. I had a new Yahoo account and no account rep.

Yahoo’s Panama platform painfull to deal with

The biggest challenge I faced was how to get my keywords into the advertiser account. On the old platform keywords & destination URLs had to be entered manually one-by-one. What a pain! I didn’t deal with Yahoo at all and instead decided that I wanted to wait until the Panama release came out - the thought that it could not have a bulk upload function didn’t even occur to me.

Well, Panama came around, I was one of the early accounts to be upgraded and found that I still had the same problem as before. There is no bulk upload function by default! I can paste 50 keywords at once into an adgroup, but then have to specify destination URLs by clicking into each keyword individually - this will keep you busy for quite a while when you want to submit thousands of keywords.

I wrote customer support and asked for the bulk upload link to be enabled. The response I received was that I had to spend at least $6000/year for it to be enabled. So while I was able to up my spend on Google from zero to thousands of dollars a month virtually instantly, Yahoo needed a little more attention until I was “granted permission” to increase my spend through keyword submissions. I submitted my broadest keywords, to increase my spend to about $300/day, waited a few days and called customer support to ask again for the bulk upload function. Now I was told I had to maintain my spend for 2-3 months before I was “granted” the bulk upload function. Reason: “Everybody could tell us that they maintain their spend level, but we require proof.”

Yahoo - this ship’s going down

From my experience as a new advertiser, it became clear that Yahoo fails to understand where the search marketing space is heading. As advertisers become more savvy & experienced in search marketing, the customer demands on features will be centered mostly around volume management - how to add/delete as many keywords as possible & manage performance effectively via bidding. With Panama, Yahoo is going down the “It must have Ajax & look cool” path. Never mind that it costs you possibly billions in forgone advertising money because campaign management is too cumbersome and marketers’ resources are allocated to the engine that provides volume, quality traffic & provides the necessary tools to manage the 10,000 keyword baby diaper campaign. That engine, by the way, would be Google.

MSN allows to upload 10,000 keywords at once, Google releases a desktop application that allows you to upload/manage 100,000+ keywords - Yahoo allows you to submit 50 keywords at a time, without destination URLs. What an accomplishment! Worth waiting for. True, the new bidding platform will allow Yahoo to extract more revenue from advertisers by switching from a second price auction to a Vickrey auction model. However, having simply more participants in the keyword actions in the first place seems a sensible way to increase revenue.

I doubt that the 50 keyword upload function will get new advertisers excited and will bestow Yahoo with an untapped customer base. Quite frankly, the new Panama lacks too many features. In addition, it appears that Yahoo’s challenges for growth are almost archaic policies that were put in place to allocate resources to the largest of its advertisers. As search goes mainstream and competition heats up, wouldn’t it be time to revisit some of these policies?

Yahoo better gets its act together in the next release of Panama. For the time being, since my dollars aren’t good enough for Yahoo, I better get back to a new submission for Google & MSN. They don’t seem to mind taking my keywords or my money.

Bookmark to:

The Google Sneeze

flo6790 — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 22:10:40 +0000

Just read DavidZHawk’s post on what he calls the Google Sneeze. It’s about time that someone calls out the big search marketing blogs on their poor quality of poosts. Often these blogs just repeat news that is already publicly known or simply unimportant; quality posts grow thin on some of those blogs mentioned in David’s post. Personally, I wouldn’t have provided them with the backlinks or I would have used a noffolow link tag.

In any case, I don’t feel very compelled to simply repeat all the industry news, although it might happen here and there as I get carried away. I try to stick to analysis & commentary that is insightful and hopefully helpful to readers.

I haven’t been a very active blogger recently, although I still plan on getting back into it. It’s tough with a full-time job plus running search campaigns on the side.

Bookmark to:

Yahoo’s Panama finally live!

flo6790 — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 17:32:40 +0000

This is good news - last night I received an email from Yahoo with a big headline “The New Sponsored Search Is Now Live!” Finally. After Yahoo hasn’t really talked about Panama in their earnings call, they still seem set to roll it out in Q4 of 2006.

It appears that transfers of current accounts to the new platform are made gradual, with assistance of Yahoo. This is likely to take a couple of months; my guess is that larger advertisers get their account(s) migrated very early on. An upgrade center is publicly available, although it only offers some information without any way to actually upgrade. Advertisers will need a new account login for the new platform, which they can either wait for or request. I am not going to ramble on about the procedure of upgrading - check out the upgrade center or this upgrade brochure (PDF).

What’s new in Panama? Not much, to be honest. But here some quick facts:

Accounts exist of campaigns, which may contain up to 1,000 Ad groups; ad groups can contain up to 1,000 keywords.
Ad groups can contain up to 20 creatives.
There will be a bulk upload mechanism available for small advertisers as well. Currently bulk uploading is available to advertisers that spend more that $6,000 per year.
I heard rumors that there will be a Google import tool, which allows advertisers to import Google keywords & account structure into Yahoo.
Bids will be hidden in the marketplace.

This is not a comprehensive list of new features, of course, but you get the idea - Yahoo copies Google’s platform. I think that is okay, as long as they make sure their performance improves. The current (old) search platform often breaks down for advertisers with a large keyword portfolio.

This is also probably a good point to note that Yahoo is releasing an API to go along with the new platform. I’ve read the documentation and in terms of functionality it looks very similar to Google’s. I am not sure what the pricing or availability for the new API will be. But currently access to the old DTC-XML API and the new API is locked - advertisers that want to develop against either one will only get access to the new platform, once it is fully deployed.

P.S.: I appologize for the lack of posts during the last month…due to lots of work I had little time to post, but will try to be better about it.

Bookmark to:

Ad text quantity vs. quality

Florian — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 08:51:25 +0000

I received the following question the other day, which I would like to discuss in more depth:

What is the maximum amount of copies in and AdWords AdGroup?

The straight answer is “I don’t know.” I have never reached a copy limit within the same adgroup. But let me paraphrase the question slightly to highlight what I think the a good question to ponder about:

How many copies should I have in my AdGroup?

Purpose of ad copy optimization

When thinking about submitting new copies into an AdGroup and quantity is even a concern that comes up, it is worthwhile taking a step back and asking “What do I want to acheive by submitting many copies into the same AdGroup?”

The purpose of any copy submission or copy optmimization should be to find the one that performs best. But what does “best” really mean in the context of ad text optimization? Naturally, click through rate (CTR) is a good starting point. If you compare the ctrs of all your copies within the same adgroup over the same period of time , you might notice that some ad text has clearly higher ctr than the others. However, when you jufge strictly by ctr you might be making one of the common AdWords mistakes I have mentioned in a previous post.

Don’t forget the serving rate

Important information about the quality of your copy is the serving rate - if Google serves one copy more often relative to the others in that adgroup, it usually means that Google expects that copy to perform better. The serving rate, however, is not always dependent on the copy’s ctr or avg. cpc. I have seen copies with the highest serving rate in an adgroup that neither had the highest ctr nor avg. cpc. So good ad text is one that has a relatively high ctr and high serving rate.

Limit number of copies in one adgroup

Coming back to the quantity…it is not beneficial to submit many copies at the same time, because Google needs longer to determine for each one whether it is a good copy or not. In other words, Google’s ad optimizer kicks in later. This ad optimizer depends on an impression threshold for each copy, which I think is about 1,000. If your copies haven’t received 1,000 impresions yet, the serving rates are not being optimized and impressions are distributed equally across all your copies in an adgroup.

If you dump 20 copies into an adgroup, it will take you 20,000 impressions just to get the optimizer started. 20k impressions per adgroup can take quite some time to accummulate. However, if you only submit 3 copies at first, your adgroup only needs 3k impressions for you to know which one of the 3 is the best (this is not always true, of course, but bear with me here). Remove the 2 poor performing copies, and add 2 new ones. Benchmark the performance of the 2 new copies against the surviving copy from the previous test. Repeat. Repeat. This methodology ensures that you find a good copy quickly and you always benchmark new copies against it. You might be able to roll out the best copy to all your adgroups much faster - the lift to your campaigns can be quite significant.

Bookmark to:

New AOL search analysis tool for marketers

Florian — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 08:15:18 +0000

I have finally finished working on the AOL search data tool that I hinted at in a previous post. I didn’t just want to throw out something that queries the AOL user searches and returns a flat list of results, although it is available.

The main goal for me to build this tool was to give marketers a tool that lets them research keywords or industry segments on a more aggregate level. I think it is very useful to do keyword research, understand user search behavior as well as doing industry research.

What’s the tool doing?

For a given search query, the tool queries against 36+ million records and retrieves the searches performed by AOL users. It then gives you the option of aggregating the result set a little bit. It’s nothing fancy, but you stumble over some interesting stuff when rolling up data.

Key Features

Keywords are aggregated and the total number of queries & clicks are counted; along with it, the tool calculates the click though rate for every unique keyword.
Click through rate by rank: this is an aggregation view by broken down by rank. Basically, for every position the tool counts the number of keywords and calculates a click through rate by position.
Click through rate by page: similar to the CTR by rank aggregation/calculation, just that it is broken down by the page number. So you can compare what the aggregate click through rate was for keywords on the first page, versus keywords that appeared on the second or third page.

Please let me know if you would like to have additional functionality and I am happy to build it in.

Tip: You can exclude words from appearing in the result set by using a “-”. For example, if you wanted to look at all keywords that contain the term mortgage, but not calculator, you could search for “mortgage -calculator”

What’s next?

Admittedly, the tool is not lightning fast as it should be, depending on how broad your initial query is. I will start working on speeding it up, so stay tuned! If you are a DB guru and can help, please drop me a note.

Bookmark to:

eBay teams up with Google

flo6790 — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 20:03:37 +0000

eBay & Google announced a partnership in which Google is the exclusive provider of text-based ads to eBay’s international properties. Yahoo has struck a similar deal with eBay in the US, but with the difference that Yahoo will be able to provide image based advertising as well and will support PayPal as a payment platform, according to the Financial Times.

This seems to be yet another big deal for Google, especially after reaching an agreement with MySpace. After Microsoft has signed a deal with Facebook, it’s clear that search engines are grabbing for traffic to support their advertiser base with web properties. One big difference between the eBay & Google partnership however is, that displaying advertising to eBay users is probably of much higher value than displayong it to a roaming MySpace crowd. Ebay customers are willing to spend money and clearly searching for products, so the value to Google advertisers of having their ads thrown up infront of those users is high.

To be honest, though, I think this is rather bad news for the search marketing space - competition is healthy for bringing out innovative products. And when checking Google’s product offering, specifically AdWords & their API, it has been a follower rather than an innovator. The incentive to innovate is likely to decrease as market share of Google increases, so in the long-run that might leaves marketers with relatively poor products they have to deal with.

Bookmark to:

Reviewed: Black Hat SEO forum

Florian — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 07:27:08 +0000

In a previous post I mentioned the launch of a black hat seo forum. Back then, I didn’t give away too much information about the forum itself, because it was new and there wasn’t much going on in it. Now that it had some time to attract not only links, but also registered users, I would like to quickly talk a bit about what you will get at $100/month.

The forum has 4 broad sections of which only 2 are worth mentioning:

Create sites

A lot of blackhat’s “SEO” efforts seems to evolve around pumping out tons of websites; the art appears to get them indexed by Google, keep them in the index for as long as possible and then start the whole process all over again. Of course, the traffic that is generated in this process is monetaized, presumably with Adsense.

When generating thousands of websites and filling them up with content, the blackhat community is looking for content sources and automated tools to produce the websites. Tools that are used range from simple screenscrapers, data dumps from wikipedia or language mutation software that makes use of Markov chains and Bayesain filters. I would have liked to find out a bit more about language mutation, but the posts in this particular section were rather thin. Discussions about site builders focused around content generators such as RSSGM (Realy Simple Site Generator Modified) or competing products.

Get Traffic

This section was a real disappointment. Discussions mainly focused around link bait strategies and sites that can be used for link dumping. Example sites, among others, include newsvine.com or slashdot.com - what a tip! The $100 were worth it just for these two tips alone…yaaaaaaawn.

Other strategies of traffic acquisition include hoax news stories - these are really just made up, sensational stories to get a lot of dig or reddit clicks. The effort put into thesde fake stories os quite extensive; it includes building a fake news site (with some scraped content from real news sites), writing press releases and building up MySpace profiles.

Conclusion

The forum is not particularly active - perhaps it is too early to judge and the community grows a bit. However, having people pay $100/month isn’t really a great growth driver. But that was probably the intention of the founder.

In any case, I find the forum rather boring and not very insightful. To be fair, the reason why I was so bored was because of personal preference - I just wouldn’t enjoy throwing out a gazillion junk sites, making a few pennies or dollars on each, shutting them down and starting all over. Sure, some people make a lot of money with this. I personally cannot think of many jobs that are more unfulfilling.

My recommendation is to save your dough and focus on more viable business ideas, unless you are deeply entrenched in the blackhat seo stuff already. However, if you are just hoping to find a few quick tips on how to rank #1 on Google for your widget site, this is clearly the wrong space.

Bookmark to:

Saleforce to integrate with Adwords

Florian — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 20:54:18 +0000

As the folks on TechCrunch already mentioned, Salesforce is integrating AdWords into their product at $300/month. This is a natural step towards integrating CRM products with a growing and very measurable distribution channel such as search.

So far it seems that Salesforce integrates with AdWords mainly for reporting purposes, with some basic functionality such as deploying keywords and ad text. But the tool seems to lack actual management features. There is a lot more to search marketing than just looking at the metrics, although it is a very important part. My guess is that there is more to come in the features, but for now it is a first step to linking online traffic with offline sales resources that can pick customers up in parts of the conversion funnel where customers would usually be lost to a business.

Bookmark to:

7 Common Google AdWords misconceptions

Florian — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 18:16:12 +0000

Ok, I have to admit, it’s been a while since my last post…I’ve been crunching some of the AOL data that was released and will try to throw some simple analysis tool up soon. But enough of this for now…

From personal experience and by talking to like-minded, geeky search marketers it appears that various details about the Google AdWords system remain puzzling at times. The adwords system is a rather blackbox system, intentionally kept this way. The information asymmetries between advertisers and Google help Google maximize revenue & profit.

In any case, what are some of the questions or issues that advertisers continuously stumble over?

I can easily change a keyword’s poor click through rate history by moving it to another adgroup
Google stores the ctr for a keyword on the account level. That means moving your keyword from one adgroup to another within the same AdWords account will not have any impact on the keyword’s click through rate history. Even if you delete your keyword in adgroup A and submit it again into adgroup B, your keyword’s click through rate history will be contained. So moving your keywords around within one account will not reset your keyword’s ctr history. You could, however, just open a new account and move poor ctr keywords into that new account. But be aware that starting a new account can be somewhat difficult.
If I increase my ad text CTR, my rank will improve automatically
A rank, or position, is not directly determined by the ad text that resides in a given adgroup. The rank is determined by the keyword’s CTR history, the max CPC and the black-box quality score. As such, getting a better CTR on a specific ad copy will induce more users to click and hence indirectly impact the underlying keyword’s click through rate. The ad text ctr is used to determine which copy in your adgroup to serve.
Keyword insertion increases the relevancy of my ad text
I talked to an AdWords representative about this and specifically asked whether keyword insertion would increase the ad text’s relevancy. The answer was no. That was news to me at the time, but it makes sense. Imagine a copy such as:
{KeyWord:SEM Punch Rocks}
{KeyWord:SEM Punch Rocks}
{KeyWord:SEM Punch Rocks}
www.sempunch.com

Would this be targeted, for a keyword such as “PPC marketing”? What matters is not how creatively an advertiser can use dynamic keyword insertion. Important is what other words, or tokens, are in the copy and how relevant they are to each keyword inserted in the ad text.
If I increase the bids on new keywords, they quickly accummulate good click through rate history and my min CPC drops
Who hasn’t thought of this yet? Just bump up the bids when launching new keywords and they will get a high CTR - then lower the bids later on and you rank well because of your keywords’ great history. It doesn’t work. Google calculates a rank-adjusted CTR, i.e. Google normalizes click through rate data for each rank. This means, Google has specific expectations for click through rates at each position and benchmarks your actual CTR against those expectations. How are Google’s expactations calculated? I believe they calculate an average CTR in their network for each keyword at each position, but that is only my guess. If you perform better than that average value, you “perform better” relative to your competitors (by being able to maintain lower CPCs for a fixed amount of traffic).
In one adgroup, the copy with the highest CTR is the best
If Google reports a higher click through rate for one copy versus another, it is tempting to believe that the high ctr copy is the best. However, this might not be case. Consider copy A with ctr= 2% and copy B with ctr =1.5%, both launched at the same time. I have seen instances where the serving rate was higher for copy B than copy A. In other words, even though the ctr for copy B was lower, Google choose to show it more often. When you do copy testing and you remove text ads from your adgroups, make sure that you take the serving rate for each text ad into account.
If i switch my keyword URL, my adgroup & keywords go under review
If you have legacy keywords in your adwords account, it could be that you still receive some traffic for keywords that would not pass Google’s automated review process today. This is because over time Google has changed its guidelines for certain sets of words. Of course, I would be concerned about anything that would potentially make my keywords go under review again. But you can switch the keyword destination URL without triggering a ew review process.
I can just carelessly dump as many keywords into my account
Each account has a limit of 1 million keywords. Not too many people reach this limit, but misspellings and canonical search terms can explode your keyword portfolio. Make sure you don’t reach this account limit because of junky keywords that will never even receive an impression.

Bookmark to: