Moderator Dana Todd, Founding Partner SiteLab International
Speakers Jeff Nienaber – Sr. Marketing Manager, All Star Directories Liz Serafin, Senior Director, TMP Directional Marketing Kevin Lee, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder, Did-it.com Isobel Sopoglian, VP of Search, NewCars.com
This session was all over the place so here’s the main points.
Yahoo’s Panama: trick or treat? – Isobel Says it’s getting yummier. Their getting higher conversions but not getting their traffic up like last year. Blames the keyword matching for the problems. Kevin compares it to a big box of candy that only has 1 piece of candy inside. There’s a treat but its smaller than what expected. Liz likes the geo-targeted for local but traffic is still low compared pre-integration to Panama. Jeff says you need to be much more engaged instead of setting and forgetting.
MSN: too many sugary snacks, no substance? – Liz is starting to like MSN. Seeing pretty good conversion rates and lots of traffic. Complains about targeting – hard to test because users have to be logged in to passport while searching. Jeff sees a little better volume but is still waiting. Kevin says it’s a sugary snack in a childproof container. Fortunately the API has gotten better and compares that to the “yummy part” Isobel also sees great conversions and says the API is much stronger than in the past.
Cost of Google’s candy keeps rising – Kevin talks about the upcoming bid changes and quality score. If your quality score and bid is high enough they’ll move you above the organic positions. If your willing to bid up and quality score and bid pressure is bidding high enough this increases your chances to be in the top spot. The minimum quality score is going to be more important. Jeff says it’s a lot about the vertical that you’re playing in.
Panelists: share your best “treat”!
Jeff: Exploit programming errors! Google Adwords DKI Hack. It exploits the trademark. Insert DKI in an all caps format in the title. Lasts 24-48 hours. Not recommended because you will get a nasty letter. If you do it, try testing from 3-5 in the afternoon. (I personally would never do this. Why do something that you know is wrong just for a few hours or a day of “success”.)
{KEYWORD: Law Enforcement Training}
Kevin: Sneak in a High Position when it counts. Find geographies that have a high conversion rate & set up campaigns for high opportunity keywords that become profitable in those Geo’s. Your competition won’t even know they are losing position if you pick the right Geo’s.
Seasonal Campaign Clones. For seasonal campaigns setup clones, pause them to rotate instead of changing out your creative/landing pages in single campaigns. Preserves highest quality score and keeps history.
Liz: Leverage data from the engines. Recent reporting and interface enhancements are providing additional data to help you make campaign optimization decisions. Over the past few months the search engines have bettered their reporting capabilities. Pay attention to quality scores. You aren’t able to see specifics but you can see a range. The impression share report is useful to see how much traffic you’re missing out on. Search query report from Google. If your doing broad or phrase match you can see your high traffic keywords. This gives you ideas as to what negatives you should use and where you have a job to be done in terms of adding keywords.
Account campaign performance by time is also a nice feature. Make sure you gather enough data to be statistically significant however.
Isabel: Keyword Insertion Trick – Avoid having lots of very small ad groups but still have a perfect creative. Use keyword insertion and use the Alt Text feature.
Identify terms that don’t sound good in given creative, and utilize the Alt text feature at the keyword level of Yahoo! Check the box and enter a phrase or keyword that is more aligned.
Trick to get visibility into Geo ads – Select a location in yahoo homepage like weather option (insert the geographical location you want to test) – Search a keyword on the web search box – Geo results will be displayed in the Yahoo search page. Works only on Yahoo!
Who’s giving razor blades in the apples?
- Advanced Match Drivers – Important to use negative match. Inconsistencies on how Google has been matching terms. - Errors in Google geotargeting – Isobel talked about a user and even though they hadn’t put in a geotargetted query if they lived in San Francisco that they saw results in Michigan and other states. They added those states as negatives and the problem was solved. - API taxes – are they impacting you? Kevin says unless the API is being abused that it doesn’t really solve any problems. Isobel mentions that when they were testing they were eating up a lot of quota so they had to make drastic changes. Required some reengineering. Microsoft is the only one that doesn’t charge for that. - Googe CPA: trick or teat? – Kevin thinks it’s a trick because they want you to use their pixel to calculate the conversions. Easy to double count and double pay because of this. Only a few people in the audience have used the CPA and just 1 was satisfied.
Provided by Justin Davy.
