Search Engine Marketing Blog | Tug » Yahoo

Top 5 PPC Myths

rainelda — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:31:02 +0000

The world is full of myths, starting from the human body and ending with a cable wire, so it is no surprise that myths regarding PPC also exist. Buy doing a little research because of pure curiosity, it was possible to find more than 50 myths. Some were just for fun and laughs, some were very serious, but below is a reduced list of the top 5 myths:

Being in the 1st position will make your ads most profitable. This is not entirely true. There is no doubt that being in the 1st position gives the best visibility of your ad to a user and sometimes that can result in a conversion (after a user clicks on your ad, of course), but mostly it will end up spending more money that what the ad is generating. Being in the 1st position is great for branding purposes, however it also drives a lot of users who are not yet ready to make a purchase, subscribe to an email newsletter or register on the site, but are still researching. It is advised to experiment with ad positions, so that you can determine the position that works best and helps you achieve the right balance of costs vs. value.
Add and use as many keywords into your PPC account as possible to get the most traffic. In theory you may get a ton of traffic, however it is important to keep in mind relevancy. By adding a lot of keywords, the traffic you get from it won’t be qualified traffic. This will most probably result in unwanted clicks or no action from users what so ever. Let’s admit, if you are selling chocolate, for example, there is no point to bid on clothing or shoe related keywords. It is important to target the most relevant keywords for your PPC account, otherwise it’s likely to use all your budget quickly without generating any of your desired conversions.
After setting a PPC account you can forget about it. A lot of people think that they can create campaigns and ad groups, set budgets, bids, load in keywords, ads and walk away. Although it would be very nice and easy, unfortunately this isn’t true. PPC is not a “set it and forget it” if you want to make the most of the money you are willing to invest or spending at the moment. It takes monitoring, testing, adding, removing, bid increasing or lowering, turning off, turning on, etc., in order to get the highest results for the money you spend. Because of the workload involved in managing a PPC account many businesses choose to outsource their accounts to PPC agencies, which can dedicate time and expertise to complete the mentioned tasks.
Opening up a new PPC account will re-start your Quality Scores. This actually is partially a myth, because technically if you open up a new PPC account your Quality Scores will reset, however, if you are keeping the same account structure, landing pages, ads, keywords, etc., you are going to end up with approximately the same Quality Score as you had previously. To improve your Quality Score, you need to monitor your account or maybe even re-structure to organize your campaigns, ad groups, keywords to reach the most targeted audience possible.
Test ads every week regardless of the clicks they have. And again this isn’t true. It is important that when ads are tested (before deciding on when to pause or leave an ad on) to give them a longer date range to look at. Also be sure that each ad has at least 100 clicks – the more the better, before making any final decision. This will allow to get a true perspective on which ads are performing best over time. If an ad is paused too early, it could result in pausing a potentially great performing ad. Sometimes testing can take a longer time period, but it can achieve very positive results.

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Yahoo Instant – Yahoo takes on Google with Yahoo Search Direct

Neil — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 17:15:41 +0000

Yesterday the 23rd of March saw Blake Irving, Yahoo’s Chief technology officer, unveil Yahoo Search Direct Yahoo’s competition to Google Instant. According to a post on Yahoo’s corporate blog the new feature is currently in Beta and ”predicts search results as fast as a person types, character by character, and presents those results dynamically, generating a fast, simple search experience”

One of the main features of Yahoo Direct is that it doesn’t just provide normal search results, its combines its own results with rich information from the world wide web including weather, top searches, film times, shopping categories and more.

Weather info:

Film Times:

Head of Yahoo Search Shashi Seth says that Search Direct is currently operating in 15 main categories but will soon be rolled out to hundreds, what’s also interesting is that Seth states that Yahoo Direct is running a separate smaller index and a separate algorithm. For more information watch the Yahoo Direct search video below:

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Delicious & Altavista to be Shut Down

David — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 16:03:36 +0000

TechCrunch managed to get their hands on a leaked slide from a Yahoo presentation which showcased a number of companies owned by Yahoo which are to get shut down, these included Delicious, AltaVista, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Bookmarks & Yahoo! Picks. There are also a number of other properties which are also said to be merging with other Yahoo owned sites: Upcoming, FoxyTunes, Sideline, FireEagle, Yahoo Events and Yahoo People Search.

Tech Crunch have since that the leaked slide is in fact true and that they are to be shut down. See below for the official quote from Yahoo:

“Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond.

We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate.”
Read the original TechCrunch article here.

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The fall of the Yahoo Empire

Carlos Rabanillo — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 12:57:26 +0000

In 1994 two Stanford students created the “David and Jerry’s World Wide Web Guide”, which later took the name of Yahoo, in 2000 its market value reached $ 128 per share. But the company has ceased to be one of the big boys. We present an interesting graphics that analyzes the decline of Yahoo!

It is curious that in 2002 Yahoo wanted to buy Google for $3,000 million and now Yahoo itself is the one that could be purchased by Google if they wanted to.The Internet industry is a “Dog eat dog world”, if you make a mistake or can’t adapt to changes, then you lose.

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SEO: How are you doing on Bing?

Carlos Rabanillo — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 10:48:37 +0000

Perhaps you are wondering why talk about Bing when we have Google

Some of you may not even care about this search engine from Microsoft …

“But according to Nielsen, last week Bing surpassed Yahoo’s share of search volume becoming the second most used browser in the United States. ”

Obviously Google still dominates the first place, but it seems like even Eric Schmidt took notice of Bing’s achievement:

“Right now, Bing is Google’s strongest competitor … even stronger than Apple or Facebook.”

I’m not saying you should change your link building strategy right now, but you should start tracking your positions on Bing, especially now that they are powering the results for Yahoo..

So, do you see Bing and Google going “mano a mano” anytime soon?

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Google Instant ‘vs’ Yahoo Handwritten Search

Carlos Rabanillo — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 09:53:23 +0000

Loads of people find Google Instant fun and amusing…. I find it really annoying. Anyways if you do find it fun have a look at Yahoo’s new handwritten search (it only works in Taiwan and Yahoo Hong Kong)

Searchers can handwrite their search queries and Yahoo will try to match the handwriting to letters, and then show suggested searches.

For more info on how it works and screenshoots read the Yahoo blog post.

You’ll need the latest version of Adobe’s Flash Player for this writing panel to work. Yahoo says the technology supports Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, English, and numbers.

Looks pretty awesome to me! Yahoo 1 – Google 0

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Changes at Yahoo – Search Monkey is no more, Site Explorer is staying

David — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 11:31:41 +0000

Last night Yahoo announced that they will be making changes to it’s Search back-end infrastructure. Unfortunately Yahoo Search Monkey will no longer be supported (although they will continue to index current Search Monkey apps) and as of October 1st 2010 it will be no more. MyBlogLog will also be shutdown. Developers will now also be charged to use Yahoo BOSS. But there is good news! Both Yahoo & Bing will continue to support Yahoo Site Explorer – this was a big concern for SEOs who use Site Explorer as an every day tool. For now any changes are only going to take place in the US & Canada. See below for a quote from the Official Yahoo Developer Blog:

“Today we’re making some important announcements on the transition of our Search back-end infrastructure to Microsoft, and how this transition impacts the Search APIs and web services we offer on the Yahoo! Developer Network. We are also sharing specific news about several of our other developer services.

Over recent years, Yahoo! has made a commitment to developers by opening products, services, and canvases for third-party innovation. This commitment remains unwavering. For example, we recently announced new canvases and APIs as part of our Zynga deal. At the same time, we have to align our developer offerings with our products and strategy….”

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Flickr rolls out new Photos Page

David — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 10:23:32 +0000

Today Flickr announced that they are rolling out a new Photos page to all of it’s users, see below for a list of new features taken from the Flickr Blog:

“Bigger photo: We’ve increased the default view size by 28%. Your cameras will be happy that your photos now take advantage of increasingly larger and higher resolution displays! We’ve also built a new lightbox feature. Click on any photo or use the magnifying glass icon to browse through large photos on a dark background. Just you and photos — no distractions.

Navigation: Getting from one photo to the next is faster and easy. Move forward and back with ever-present navigation buttons above each photo. Want to get from one context to the next? Go from your photostream to sets to groups to any number of ways that photos are organized on Flickr is simple via the upgraded film strip on the photo sidebar. Click on the title of any film strip to switch contexts. Preview five photos at a time within the context of your choice, too.

The story: Your photos already carry the narrative elements of who, what, where, when and how whenever you upload them to Flickr. Browse Flickr and you’ll see stories within stories — photos within photostreams within groups or any kinds of combinations. So we’ve made it easier to find when a photo was taken, it’s location, camera/exif info and your name in one location to the right of the image. Along with the title and description and we think that photosharing will increasingly become story-sharing.”

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Yahoo and Bing working together

Carlos Rabanillo — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:16:18 +0000

Yahoo announced that they are already running tests on Yahoo’s search engine with Bing’s algorithm, for organic and paid results.

They said that these tests will only be seen on a maximum of 25% of the U.S. searches.
Yahoo and Microsoft’s mobile services are slowly integrating, same thing will happen with the search engines during the summer, hopes are that in September/October it will we fully integrated for the United States and Canada.

In this picture we can see search results of Yahoo and Bing working together (the yellow boxes are Bing)

This means that the search Bing’s algorithm will be fully integrated into Yahoo’s search engine, therefore our ranking positions in Bing must be taken into account, since these serps will also be in Yahoo in a few months.

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MySpace in Discussion with Yahoo & Bing

David — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:26:44 +0000

The search advertising deal with MySpace and Google is going to be finishing next month and MySpace will be free to move their search to a new supplier. The Wall Street Journal report that MySpace is in talks with Yahoo and Bing for a new search deal. See below for a quote from the WSJ:

“News Corp. is in discussions with Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. about replacing MySpace’s crucial search-advertising partnership with Google, which expires next month, according to people familiar with the matter.

Under the existing deal, Google agreed to make up to $900 million in guaranteed payments for the right to sell small ads as users surf and tap out searches on News Corp.’s My Space.com and on a handful of smaller News Corp. websites.”

It will be difficult for MySpace to find a new deal worth any more than Google’s offer with their decreasing number of users. We’ll let you know if we hear anything!

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