3 key steps to take before all traffic transitions to adCenter

In just a few weeks, Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers will be using Microsoft Advertising adCenter to manage search marketing campaigns on both Yahoo! Search and Bing. To help ensure that you’re ready, it’s time to take a fresh look at your keyword and ad strategies.

Here are three tips to help you prepare:

1) Expand your keyword list
adCenter allows you to bid separately for singular/plural variations and common misspellings of your keywords, which gives you more control in fine-tuning your ROI. Because there is typically less advertiser competition on keyword variations, you’ll have an opportunity to get greater value on your ad spend by bidding on these terms.

Try the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence tool—a keyword research and optimization tool offered as a Microsoft Office Excel add-in—to develop keyword lists and gain insight into current bids, as well as historical and forecasted search volume. For help on using this tool, check out these step-by-step video tutorials.

2) Set keyword match types
While Yahoo! Search Marketing offers the Standard and Advanced match types, adCenter uses three match types: exact, phrase and broad. If you transition your Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns to adCenter, your Advanced match keywords will be set to broad match, and your Standard match type keywords will be set to exact match.

In adCenter, you can specify unique bids for each match type, which allows you to align your bids to individual performance. For example, you can bid more for exact match keywords that represent your core products and services, to help you reach highly qualified potential customers. Learn more about strategies for match type success.

3) Monitor your ads’ positions as you begin to use adCenter
As more and more Yahoo! advertisers begin using adCenter, you may see an increase in the number of advertisers bidding on your keywords, which could affect your ads’ positions. If your ads’ positions have gone down due to increased competition, consider adjusting your bids and setting incremental bids as needed to help meet your objectives.

Remember, you still need to manage your Yahoo! Search Marketing account until ad serving fully transitions to adCenter in late October. You’ll receive an email notification once this final stage of the transition is complete; then you’ll be able to use your adCenter account exclusively to reach customers on Yahoo! Search and Bing.

Source

From Yahoo Blog —>
You’ll be ready for the expected October move of Yahoo! Search ad serving to adCenter

Last week, we completed the transition of the back-end technology for English-language Yahoo! organic search results in the U.S. and Canada. This week, advertisers can start transitioning their paid Yahoo! Search Marketing account, in anticipation of the Yahoo! ad serving transition which we expect to start mid-October. We encourage you to transition your account before the ad serving transition begins, so that you are ready to reach more than 159 million searchers in the U.S. and 15 million searchers in Canada* on Yahoo! Search, Bing and our partners.

Start your account transition now
Beginning today, you may log in to your Yahoo! Search Marketing account and initiate your transition to Microsoft Advertising adCenter. We’ve created a detailed Transition Checklist that you should review now, to help ensure that you’re prepared to make a smooth transition to adCenter, as well as a Feature Comparison Guide, to help you get familiar with adCenter’s features and capabilities.

There are three stages to completing your transition:

1) Prepare your account for transition to adCenter
When you log into your Yahoo! Search Marketing account, you’ll automatically be taken to a new tab labeled “adCenter.” We recommend that you review your Compatibility Report, and fix incompatibilities between your current Yahoo! campaigns and the adCenter platform before starting the transition to adCenter.

2) Transition your account to adCenter
When you begin your transition, you’ll be able to create a new adCenter account, or indicate that you have an existing adCenter account that you want to continue to use. If you choose, you can use the transition tool to copy your Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns over to adCenter. Please note that your campaigns will retain the same status (active or paused) as they have within your Yahoo! account, so you may start incurring click charges for Bing traffic right away.

3) Continue to manage your Yahoo! Search Marketing account
The last stage in the transition process will occur when Yahoo! Search ad serving moves to adCenter, which we expect to begin in mid-October and be completed by the end of October. During this period, you should expect traffic from your Yahoo! Search Marketing account to decrease, and increase in your adCenter account. But until this process is complete, you’ll still need to actively manage your Yahoo! Search Marketing account to have your ads displayed on Yahoo! and our partner sites.

Commitment to quality continues
Our primary goal remains providing you with a quality transition experience in 2010, while protecting the holiday season. While we are confident that the preparation work done to date and the transition plan we are moving forward with now will help us reach this goal, please remember that deferring the paid search transition to 2011 is still a possibility if we conclude it would improve the overall experience.

We appreciate your business, and look forward to bringing you the benefits of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance.

— The Team

The new features are available for both sponsored search and content
match on day one. They can be targeted at the campaign level or on the
more granular ad group level. In addition, they will be available in
both the advertiser console and in the API.

Guy Yalif, Yahoo’s Senior Director of Advertising Products, recently
walked me through the new features. I thought I would share these
features with you from the perspective of how the advertiser can
utilize them in the Yahoo Search Marketing console.

Read full story

Since announcing plans for the partnership in June, Google and Yahoo Inc. have been negotiating with the government about possible modifications that would address objections from advertisers. “However, after four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it’s clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement,” Google chief legal officer David Drummond said in a statement today.

The government made clear in its own statement that it viewed the proposed deal as anticompetitive. “The arrangement likely would have denied consumers the benefits of competition—lower prices, better service and greater innovation,” Thomas O. Barnett, the assistant attorney general who heads up the antitrust division of the Department of Justice, said in the statement.

In its own statement, Yahoo expressed disappointment over Google’s decision, but says the deal was only an add-on to Yahoo’s own product road map “and does not change Yahoo’s commitment to innovation and growth in search.”

Google’s announcement is good news for search advertisers, says Mark Simon, vice president of industry relations at search marketing firm Didit LLC. “As Google’s reach in the search landscape has grown exponentially, it is important to the advertiser that there remains viable competition in this ecosystem,” Simon says. “Without having those options, we are all under the direct control of the lead horse.” He added his hope that Yahoo, the second-leading search engine, and No. 3 Microsoft Corp. “can help create this environment of choice for the marketer.”

Search marketing firm SearchIgnite released a report in July saying that pay-per-click ad prices could go up as much as 22% as a result of the planned Google-Yahoo partnership.  Source

Im not sure how much this would have raised any prices, I mean the bottom line here is that it would have just meant your Google adwords ads would now be shown on Yahoo sites, giving you more exposure at a higher cost.  It probably makes more sense to just open a Yahoo PPC account since the prices are usually cheaper at Yahoo per click. 

If your law firm is considering advertising online with Google, contact us for a free PPC analysis. We have helped many lawyers setup PPC programs at Google Adwords, Yahoo search marketing and MSN adcenter and have saved them all a lot of money.  PPC works because it can drive the types of clients your looking for directly to your website.

The one thing I did notice though is that they don’t automatically set any daily limits for your different campaigns and in some cases the adjustments of keywords and bids can indeed drive more traffic but at a high cost and if you dont have any daily limits setup, you can pay a lot more money then you might want to. 

Overall its a better system and I would suggest anyone who is going pay per click advertising use both Google adwords and Yahoo search marketing.

Google advertisers have been clamoring for a hard number to put on click fraud for years, but Google has been unwilling to share specifics. The company has often said that revealing too much would make it easier for fraudsters to take advantage of the system, which has frustrated advertisers who want to know where their money is going.

This revelation is the latest in a series of moves designed to offer more transparency to advertisers, Ghosemajumder said. Google has come under fire from lawsuits, click fraud reporting firms, and advertisers in recent months, all looking for more granular details on the level of invalid clicks occurring in the AdWords system.

Google is also undertaking several more click fraud-related initiatives in coming months. Among these are IP Filtering capabilities for advertisers, enhanced invalid click reports, educational initiatives, and an improved reporting format. The first three initiatives are expected to roll out this month, while the improved reporting format will come later this year, he said.

SOURCE: Search Engine Watch