Yahoo Search Marketing Courtesy Call and My Thoughts

5 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on September 24, 2007 in PPC, Yahoo Search Marketing  

I received an interesting call from Yahoo Search Marketing to talk about their “Quality Pricing”. What is interesting is they have no idea what kind of leads or revenue i am producing from an ad but yet they are some how Quality pricing the ads i am paying for based on where they come from. To my surprise without the quality pricing over the past week I would have spent more than 698 and some change on top of what my account showed. While I found this interesting, what was more concerning to me is I brought up that I am US target based but yet I still at times get more than 25% from foreign countries. From there the call went south as she doesn’t deal with that and gave me the generic we are working on it. I would think it is MUCH harder to try to guage a quality of source traffic than it is to just block foriegn traffic.

My overall thoughts to Yahoo Search Marketing:

1. Thanks for the courtesy call to let me know I would have spent more had they not introduce this “quality” system.
2. Thanks for the money back over this past month (X,XXX.XX) due to the foreign traffic you are sending me. (I had to file a click fraud report to receive the credit but well worth the time)
3. Common YSM country targeting isn’t that hard other Search Engines do it much better, even some third tier.
4. Get rid of minimum .10 bid some of the traffic isn’t even worth a few pennies let alone 10 cents.
5. Don’t just follow what Google does be proactive and make a HUGE difference in the Search engine world and you will capitalize more searchers.

That’s all i can think of now. What are yall thoughts… what can Yahoo change?

Microsoft Adcenter takes a stance on Trademark Terms and Bidding

3 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on August 30, 2007 in Affiliate Information, PPC, MSN Search  

To my surprise and delight I got an email from MSN adcenter today concerning bidding and using trademark terms. (cough Google… I hope your listening) The stance from my point of view is in favor of publishers and puts the responsibility where it is back on the trademark owners and not using the Search engines to police their trademark for them. The Official email:

Microsoft adCenter is changing the way we manage our trademark policy starting September 10, 2007. While no change will be made to the trademark policy itself, this update aligns better with marketplace practices, speeds up editorial review to get your ads live faster, and ensures consumers see relevant ads.

Microsoft adCenter’s Trademark Policy

As stated above, we are not changing the trademark policy itself. You may still use trademarked terms
in your ads  when you, as the advertiser, are the owner of the trademark, an affiliate or reseller of trademarked products or services, or a site that uses the trademarked term in an informational,
descriptive, or non-competitive manner. Infringing use of trademark terms by direct competitors remains a violation of Microsoft adCenter policies. 

What’s changing?

It will now be the advertiser’s responsibility to obtain permission from the trademark owner to use a trademarked term in their ads. It will also be the trademark owner’s responsibility to address ongoing
incorrect usage of their trademark term(s) directly with third-party advertisers.  Microsoft adCenter will no longer intercede to obtain permission for the advertiser wanting to use a trademarked term. 

What does this mean for my search advertising?

Your ads may display next to other ads that contain your trademarked terms.
Affiliates, resellers, and third parties may show up against queries for your trademarked terms.
Competitor’s ads may show up in search results against queries for trademarks in certain scenarios, due to match types other than exact.

For example, if a generic term is included in the overall search query, advertisers who bid on the generic term may show up in the search results.

If you are a trademark owner and you believe your trademark is being misused in Microsoft adCenter, you can submit a report by following the instructions on our Trademark Concern Form.

Sounds like good news for publishers/affiliates when it comes to bidding on trademark terms. While I agree using trademark terms without persmission is bad but there is no reason that for instance a Target ad shouldn’t show up when someone is searching for Wal-mart.

Why Not Tracking Your Campaigns can Cost you Money!

6 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on August 22, 2007 in Affiliate Tips, PPC, Yahoo Search Marketing  

You can read everywhere that people suggest you track you campaigns and statistics, even on this blog. Meaning not relying on Google, Yahoo, Msn or other networks to rely on them to send you just the country or target traffic you are paying for.  There are many programs out there that you can pay for that will track the IP’s of your visitors and be able to tag to a certain campaign, or you can have one built. I personally had one built for me as the ones out there worked but I couldn’t get the information I wanted or get it in the way I wanted it. Yes this cost me a decent penny to get this tracking program built, but it has paid for itself already several times over.
Take this example. I am running a campaign on yahoo search marketing and I was checking my program stats and noticed that I was seeing a lot of traffic from foreign countries and my whole account is set to US only.  So I dig thru my stats for Aug 1 thru 13 and find that anywhere from 10 to 25% is from foreign countries.  So I log into my Yahoo search marketing account and contact them letting them know what I am seeing and attach a report for just one of the days and state that I am seeing this on all days Aug 1 thru 13. A day later I get an email stating it has been escalated to their click fraud department and I should get an email in a few days. Two days later I get this email:

Our investigation concluded that your account experienced one or more occurrences of the following situations:

?        Unusual end user activity or behavior
?        System issues

As a result, we have issued an adjustment to your account in the amount of $X,XXX.XX. This adjustment should post to your account within three to four business days. You can view your billing history through the Reports section of your account by selecting the Billing Transaction Detail Report.

To protect the integrity of our systems, we unfortunately cannot provide you with the specific details associated with the identified pattern of behavior. We want to assure you that we are always working to improve the quality of the traffic delivered to advertisers and as such we are taking the appropriate steps to help prevent these types of activity from occurring again in the future. Our sophisticated Click Protection System runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week and is designed to prevent advertisers from being charged for certain clicks. However, there may be instances, such as this one, where we make additional adjustments to your account.

As you can see they don’t come out and say we agree with you that you received foreign traffic, they did offer me a nice credit. With that said I was making a profit on the campaign even with this amount of foreign traffic being sent. So the credit is just icing on the cake, but this is something that is deserved by me as I am paying for US traffic not foreign traffic. This is just one example of why you need to track your campaigns by a third party software that tracks IP addresses etc. to monitor it for foreign traffic or even click fraud that you are billed for.  One other instance you can read about is from PepperJam Search and their $10,000 “Goodwill Credit” .

Q&A Natural Search Engine Rank, Adwords and Landing Pages

13 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on July 5, 2007 in Affiliate Tips, Google Adwords, PPC  

Today I decided to do a little Q&A due to an email i received from Edwin.

1)I rank number 1 on Natural Search Engine Rank for my niche, but should i still use AdWords?

If you have natural search engine rank for any terms that get searches daily props to you. Especially in a high volume market. Should you use adwords?  YES!!!!  On all my natural ranking sites that i make money off of and i am not capturing the whole audience I use adwords.

a. You can capture more of your audience, as i doubt you are getting 100% of the traffic that is searching.

b.  Make a custom ad towards the search engine visitors, and you can change it often to see what works.

c. Due to you ranking #1 most likely (not guaranteed) you will get good Quality Score which will mean cheap bids.

2)Do colors really make a difference in sales?

 I am assuming you meant on landing and sales pages. Yes they can make a difference. Anything from color to placement to the signup or sale process can make a drastic difference in the amount of sales or leads. The best way is to test different colors or layouts with your main sales or landing page and keep which one converts the best. In the short term you may lose a little but in the long term you will gain more profits.

If you have a question you would like me to answer use the contact form or leave a comment. Sometimes I answer via my blog and others in private. Hope everyone had a happy fourth of July!

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