Alright, so you have your keyword list built out. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of keywords all ready and waiting to be typed in and searched by your beloved audience. You’re ready to get people on your site. You’re excited.

But here’s the snag: unless you’re running campaigns made entirely of exact match keywords, you’re going to need to throw in a few negatives to keep the undesirables out. And by a “throw in a few,” I mean “build a comprehensive list.”

Why? Well, first off, a lot of people underestimate the power of the negative keyword. But if you think about it, negatives refine the search process just as much as any other keyword. They all have the same purpose, though the methods are different: keywords bring certain people in and negative keywords keep certain people out. Like a guest list and a bouncer, respectively. You need both to throw a successful shindig.

Yeah, just roll with me on the analogies here.

Like this one: basically, negatives are the silly putty that plug the holes left by broad and phrase match keywords. Without them, your search funnel will be leaking all over the place. Which just leads to wasted money, in the end.

So what’s the first step? Keeping in mind that there are two different levels of negative keywords, the ad group level and the campaign level. And trust me, they’re not the same.

Ad group level negatives are best used to keep your ad groups completely separate from each other, so that search queries don’t trigger a broad match in one ad group when there’s an exact match in another ad group, one that happens to be much better suited for them. In other words, they keep your keywords in the ad groups they’re supposed to be in.

So really, all you need to do at the ad group level is cross-examine your main keywords. For example, if you have Dog Toys and Squeaky Dog Toys ad groups, then you should probably make “squeaky” a negative keyword in the Dog Toys ad group. That way, anybody who types in “squeaky dog toys” gets ad creative from the right ad group.

That’s really it for ad group level negatives. Campaign level negatives, in the other hand, are a bit trickier.

The best method for those is to take a good look at your keyword list and think long and hard about what kind of searchers you want to exclude. In some cases, these might be fairly obvious (but not always), like a realtor excluding “courses,” “picture,” and “jobs.” The people typing those in are probably not the people a real estate agent is looking for.

But in other cases, negative keywords aren’t quite so straightforward. Sometimes, you can think of them right up front, which saves you a little time and money. But sometimes, you don’t catch them until later.

The good news is, any Google search can turn up a few good lists of negative keywords, both broad and for specific sectors. Most companies also have their own negative keyword lists that you can use.

Do not, however, just copy and paste them in; you’ll run the high risk of blindly excluding people that you actually really want. Instead, you want to go through and pick and choose which ones would be best for your campaign. Use the lists as a baseline and don’t give up on brainstorming some of your own.

The last and most important step? Keep updating your negative keyword list. Don’t give up once you’ve set up the account. The best thing you can do is consistently run search query reports and pick through the things people type in to make sure that they’re all in harmony with what you want. Over time, you’ll find more and more irrelevant and non-converting keywords to add to your pile.

And that is the spirit of optimization.

Keywords, negative keywords

The ability to set up an Ad Scheduling / Day-Part bidding schedule within Yahoo was long overdue – but last April it was finally delivered to its advertisers.  Months have gone by and as it did, so did the number of accounts which we audited for errors and areas for improvement; (a complementary Engine Ready service).  Eventually I started to see a pattern which may be costing numerous Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers big.

If you use Ad Scheduling in Yahoo! Please continue to read…

When you setup the daily schedule for each of your campaigns you may or may not notice the extremely grayed out text stating:  <<Display ads based on: The audience’s time zone (default) Edit>>

If you click on the <<Edit>> button you can change this default setting to: Your Account Time Zone

Think about what this setting means and how it is going to affect your traffic.

Most of the clients where I noticed this as a problem were those who valued calls or leads submitted during normal business hours (9am-5pm).  Calls before or after this time go to an answering machine, leads sit until the next shift starts.  These inbound “Hot Leads” can not sit for long before they have no value.

Take a look at this hypothetical client and situation:

* Office Location: California (PST)
* Geo-Targeting: Entire USA
* Ad Scheduling: M-F 9am-5pm

If a Yahoo! advertiser sets up their campaign’s Ad Scheduling as listed above, they will soon start to realize that they are getting leads/Calls beginning at 7am (PST) and ending 8pm (PST)

Take a look the chart below.  It shows you in green when the office is open and in red when it is not.

Your account will be active in some part of the country for an additional 5 hours outside of your 9-5 office hours.  Up to 3 hours after you close, the entire Eastern Seaboard is still seeing your ads on Yahoo.com and their partner sites.

I can not stress enough how important it is to ensure that your Ad Scheduling settings correctly.

It is interesting that Yahoo! elected to default this setting to “Audience Time Zone” as opposed to “Account Time Zone” – A power user can certainly see how you could leverage this feature and test strategies which you are unable to do in Google nor MSN, but the vast majority of advertisers will neither take advantage of this feature nor see (in the faded gray text) that it is set up to run this way.

Did Yahoo! do it this way to maxamize their advertisers spending – by showing ads during the prime time for each time zone? Who knows…

Does anyone else have comments they wish to share about this feature?

Ad Scheduling, Yahoo

1. Open the Adwords Editor and download the newest version of your account

2. Export desired campaigns, if not all, to as .csv file

3. Open the exported csv file in Excel

4. Remove all negative keywords(without sorting)(

• Select All(Ctrl + A)
• Turn on the “Filter”

• Filter the “Keyword Type” column to only include negative keywords

• Once only the Negative Keywords are showing select all rows(excluding row 1) and delete.
• Clear the filter

5. Save file as UNICODE TEXT and click YES on the warning screen that pops up after clicking save

6. Close the file in excel and DO NOT save changes

7. Login to your Yahoo Search Account

8. Click the Campaigns Tab

9. Click on the “Import” link

10. Click on “Convert Third Party Campaigns”

11. Hit the browse button

12. Find the unicode txt file you saved and Click once to edit the file name.  Add .cvs to the end(VERY IMPORTANT).

13. Select the file and click “Open” to add the file into the converting box

14.  Once you receive the confirmation screen, click on return to import history

15.  Open the converted file and look at the error columns.  If there are no errors you are done, if you have errors see below.

POSSIBLE ERRORS

Error Message: The Short Description Is Too Long. Please Enter A Valid Short Description. This means that your 70 character ad in Google turned into a 71 character Ad in Yahoo, because Yahoo forces a period at the end of every ad. Play with your ad and get it to fit within the 70 character limit with a period. Yes, exclamation and questions marks are fine too.

Error Message: The Keyword ________ Was Not Added Because It Is Covered By An Existing Keyword In Your Ad Group.

This means that your keywords is already somewhere in the account, and Yahoo won’t allow duplicates. If you really want it in there twice, call your rep and ask to have your account switched to an umbrella account, with a new account opened as a child account (there will probably be small fee involved). Redo the campaign import with the new account instead of the original account. (Remember you’ll need to load conversion tracking for the new account)

Error Message: Cannot Determine Which Campaign/Ad Group Is The Parent

I really hate this one. It means that you probably tried sorting the columns when working on a project and didn’t put it back precisely the way it was. Unless you’re working with only one or two accounts, it’s usually fastest just to start over.

After you correct these errors you need to re-download the Yahoo template and paste ONLY the corrected items. Then…

• In Excel, Click On “Save As” And Save The Template File As A .Csv File With A Different Name Than The Imported Campaign (Even If You Haven’T Saved The Imported Campaign)
• Again, Click Yes On The Warning Window That Says Formatting May Not Be Compatible With Unicode Text
• Close The File Without Saving Changes
• In The Yahoo Interface Click On The Browse Buttons On The Import Campaigns Tab
• Hit The Browse Button And Find The File To Upload
• Click Once And Add .csv To The End Of The File Name
• Give It Any Import Name (Can Be Identical To Your Conversion File Name) And Click Upload
• Once You Receive The Confirmation Screen, Click On Return To Import History
• You Will See The Status Be Labeled As “In Progress” For A While. Refresh Every 10-15 Seconds Until Completed

It’s possible that you get an additional error file, but it should be smaller than the original. Keep repeating the above steps until all errors are gone and you’ll be done! Congratulations!

Keep in mind some important issues:

• Bulk uploads are limited to 10mb/day/account.
• A day is defined by 24 hours, not a business or working day.
• If you are making account updates instead of 3rd party conversions, DO NOT try to upload anything that you don’t intend changing. Attempts can kick back error messages that will make things tedious.

Adwords, convert, Google, upload, Yahoo Search

If you have ever used Yahoo for search marketing, you will already be familiar with its lack of features.  With many rants and raves from search marketers, I think Yahoo has finally got a clue…  With that said, let’s get into what Yahoo is changing and how it will affect us.

1) Day Parting – Yahoo is finally stepping their game up and including day parting in settings.  You will now be able to increase, decrease, or pause bids altogether throughout the day without having to go in manually.  This has been a huge hassle for many when it comes to Yahoo. Many accounts that are in Yahoo need to be turned on and off throughout the day and until now, you would have had to do it manually.

2) Demographic Settings – You will now be able to adjust bid percentages by certain demographics like gender and age.  This feature is possible due to the registration process of Yahoo, where you are asked these questions as you sign up.  Although this will not be 100% accurate, it will be useful in many situations.

3) Zip Code Targeting – Along with demographic bidding, Yahoo is now allowing you to control your bids for certain zip codes.  If you find more actions resulting from certain zip codes, you can now focus and bump up the bid percentage to advertise more aggressively in that certain area. This will be certainly useful for businesses that want to focus on certain cities.

4) Updated Content Network – From experience, the Yahoo content network has been horrible. We have noticed that most of the Ads show up on very poor quality sites, mainly from other countries.  Yahoo is now saying that they have increased their control over which websites your Ads show on.  Their goal is to show your Ads on sites that are relevant to your keywords, which should have been the objective starting out.  Also Yahoo will be decreasing their minimum content bid for $0.10 to $0.05 to try to persuade advertisers with past negative experiences to give the content network another try.

These are the changes that have been promised by Yahoo.  Hopefully these changes will start a trend that will result in better results and ease of use.  Unfortunately we are still waiting on a desktop editor from them.

What do you think of these additions and what else do you think should be added/changed?

Engine Ready, EngineReady, search marketing, Yahoo, Yahoo Search