As promised Yahoo has now started changing it minimum bids on keywords within customers PPC accounts. They have said that the minimum bid changes were to improve the experience of their customers but in their explanation they compared it to an auction house setting minimum bids on items to insure that someone did not walk away with a valuable item at too low a price. With that example, it would appear to me that the main reason for the increase in minimum bids would be to increase the money that Yahoo makes from its advertising customers. From what I have seen most keywords remained the same and some increased a small amount (less than $0.10) per click and then some increased 2 to 4 times from the bids.  These last increase have made some of the keywords simply too expensive except for the advertisers with the larger budgets.

Now for a break-down of how Yahoo determined the increases. They based the minimum keyword bid amount on a number of factors with the main 2 being Quality and Value. The Quality part is really the only part that you can do anything about. The quality is basically a measure of the relevance of the keyword to your ad and the landing page. Of course there are some other factors that go into this such as keyword history and click through rate but the part for you to concentrate on will be the overall relevance of the keyword to the Ad and the Landing page. The other main item that Yahoo is basing the increase on is the keyword value and basically this is determined by the popularity of the keyword and the amount advertisers are willing to bid on the term.

We will have to wait and see if Yahoo makes any adjustments to this new way of setting minimum bids but until then the best thing to do is to concentrate on making you ad groups as small and similar as possible so that you can insure that the keyword, ad and landing page are as relevant as possible to help you control the only part of the process that you can.

Dwayne Clough
PPC Marketing Manager

If you have not started already; NOW is the time to prepare your PPC Campaigns for the Holiday Shopping Period.

More and more people are turning to the internet to doing their Holiday shopping. Need more incentive, last year during the Holiday season consumers spent $24.4 billion online according to comScore. So you need to get your PPC Campaigns ready and loaded to take advantage of the increase in internet shopping for the Holiday Period.

Your campaigns should already be up, but if not you need to get them up soon.

You should start by making sure your Holiday PPC Campaigns contain all the holiday keywords appropriate for your products and don’t forget to make sure your ads are relevant and contain as much information as possible on your specials. With all the completion for the holiday shoppers you will need to be creative with your Ad content to draw attention to your Ads. You may want to make smaller Ad Groups where you can be sure to include Products in the Ads and any special prices you may have on those items. Also, remember that offering Free Shipping and including that in the Ad is advisable if possible.

Another must do, is make sure that in December as pace really increases to monitor you Campaigns more closely. The increase competition will mean that you may have to adjust your bids more often to keep your Ads in positions to get noticed. Also, don’t forget to have multiple Ads to allow you to do Ad testing and to continue to make tweaks to the Ads to draw more visitors.

Good Luck and Happy Holidays.

Yahoo Search Marketing has been switching users over to the new Panama Version since the 4^th Quarter of 2006.  I have had the pleasure of working with the new Panama Version of Yahoo since November 2006.  While not everything is as user-friendly as I would like, it is a great improvement over the older version. 

Let’s start by reviewing a few of the Pros of the new system:

1. One of my favorites is being able to group together like keywords and write one or more Ads for all of them instead of individual Ads for each term.
2. The time it now takes to get items through the editorial review process is normally less than 5 minutes, where before it could take 3 or 4 days.
3. It allows you to be more specific when needing to geographically target a campaign; now you can target individual states.
4. The new Panama version also allows you to set a separate budget for each individual campaign if you desire to do that.
5. Changing from the old system of bid amounts determining ad position to using relevancy (similar to Google) is a plus for evening up the competition for the top positions and better quality for the searcher.
6. Allowing for a longer version of the Ad to appear when your Ads are in one of the preferred positions.

A look at some of the Cons of the new system:

1. The conversion process is one of the biggest Cons.  Regardless of how well you try to follow the instructions prior to the conversion, expect there to be problems once your account has upgraded.  To get as close as you can, you need to make sure that the keywords you want grouped together have the same Ad, including: title, description, and destination URL.  But even doing this does not necessarily mean the system will see the keywords as being similar enough to group them together in the upgrade.
2. There is still no good way to make a lot of changes to your account unless you have at least a gold account.  The bulk upload option is only available to those accounts that spend $6,000 a year or more.
3. You’re still not able to set up schedules for your accounts to run unless you are a Platinum account; spending $80,000 or more a year.
4. Another CON is the amount of negative keywords allowed.  You are only allowed 50 negative keywords at the Account level and another 50 at the Ad Group level.  There are situations where this may not be enough to allow you to filter out unwanted traffic. 

There are more Pros and Cons and I am sure they will all vary depending on the likes and dislikes of each account user.  While I still think Yahoo has a ways to go to make their system friendlier for the normal user, the new Panama Version is a major step in the right direction.