A quick tidbit of information:

Engine Ready’s very own vice president, Brian Lewis, will be a guest speaker at Online Marketing Summit, an online marketing education conference being held this week in sunny San Diego.

Brian will be moderating the PPC vs. SEO: The Ultimate Search Marketing Battle panel, which seeks to finally answer one of the industry’s biggest (and toughest) questions: which is more effective, pay per click or search engine optimization? The panel will start at 10 a.m. on the 25th, the third and final day of the conference, and the debate is sure to be pretty lively, at the very least.

Online Marketing Summit runs from February 22nd to the 25th at the Paradise Point Resort & Spa in San Diego. More information can be found at onlinemarketingsummit.com.

Finally, we’d like to send out a personal invitation to visit us if you attend OMS in San Diego–our offices are only ten minutes away.

Conferences, Engine Ready, Industry Events, OMS, Online Marketing, PPC, SEO, SES

Occasionally, AdWords likes to add in nifty new features to its interface that even the most on-the-ball search marketers never really notice until a few months later, when they suddenly ask themselves (or the entire office at large), “Has this always been here?”

Such is the story of the new Segments feature, which AdWords first implemented in November of 2009 under the Filter tab.

Now, though, it gets a tab of its very own, sandwiched between All but Deleted Keywords and the aforementioned Filter tabs. Just click on that handy dandy little Segments tab, and you can sort all your performance data by network, day, week, month, quarter, year, day of the week, click type, device, and… oh, that’s it?

I think you get the picture.

Needless to say, this is a really cool and versatile new feature, made even cooler by the fact that it saves a lot of time as well. Instead of going through and selecting one day or week or month at a time in the date range in order to view your data, you can view it all at once and, blessedly, compare numbers without having to lay a finger on Excel.

Of course, since the initial discovery and subsequent whoas, we here at Engine Ready have been putting the new Segments tab to use. So far, we’ve mostly been segmenting by week, so that we can get a really good picture of why performance increases or decreases week to week. To do this, select a month (or two or three) as your date range, then segment by week. You end up getting something that looks like this:

Each of the four weeks of data is broken down, so that you can easily take a look at the changes in cost per click, conversion rate, position, and anything else that might be affecting your account’s performance. Which makes it much simpler to answer the question: why?

Which makes it much, much simpler to go for the impossible: true optimization.

Adwords, Analytics, Google AdWords, PPC

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

It was announced today that a conclusion may finally have been reached with the MSN vs. Yahoo buyout. But instead of a buyout or merger, it appears there is going to be a partnership. This new joint relationship is aptly named “Search Alliance.”

Could this mean that we will have to manage one less search engine without losing inventory?

Will this bring additional competition to Bing advertisers who have competitors only in Yahoo! and vise-versa?

…These questions are more will soon be answered.

Here are the highlights:

• Search inventory will be combined into a new unified search marketplace
• Microsoft will manage the technology platforms that deliver the algorithmic and paid search results.
• Yahoo!’s team will exclusively support high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies, and resellers.
• Microsoft’s team will support self-service advertisers
• Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising & affiliate search partners.
• Transition is scheduled for the Pre 2010 Holiday Season or early 2011.

For More Information Regarding:

Search Alliance: http://advertising.microsoft.com/search-alliance/home
Yahoo Transition: http://advertising.yahoo.com/transition/en_US
Bing Transition: http://advertising.microsoft.com/learning-center/microsoft-transition-center

Search Alliance