You may notice when you log into some/all of your Yahoo accounts today 9/2/2010,  you will have a notification screen which informs you to link your Yahoo! account and your adCenter account.

Against all odds, Yahoo and Microsoft appear to be on Schedule for the final integration into the AdCenter run Search Alliance. Lets take a look at whats involved:

You will be required to agree to selecting a check-box which states:

“(Required) By selecting this checkbox, I agree to allow Yahoo! to disclose all of my information (including my contact information, billing and payment information and credit card number, and account information) and transfer any remaining account balance to Microsoft for the purpose of Microsoft providing me with search advertising services.”

You will be given an option to select the check-box which states:

“(Optional) By selecting this checkbox, I authorize Yahoo! to copy to Microsoft adCenter any of my analytics data that has been or may be collected via Yahoo! Code on my website. If using Yahoo! Code on my website, i agree to update my privacy policy to notify my visitors that anonymous data may be collected by both Yahoo! and Microsoft.”

Once you continue by selecting the button at the bottom of the page, you will be brought to a Microsoft AdCenter login page. From here you will either log into your current AdCenter Account or Create a new one from scratch. At this point Yahoo will begin parsing your campaign data into MSN.

Compatibility Alerts:

MSN will ask you if they should increase low bids to AdCenters minimum Bid and if you want to continue to serve Canada ads.

Compatibility Check:

When the system finishes parsing your Yahoo campaign structure in Adcenter you will be presented with a number of compatibility issues which where found. <Remember: Yahoo’s keywords and Ads follow a completely different set of rules than AdWords and AdCenter. Headlines in ads can be greater than 25 characters and they have only 1 description line. Yahoo also runs with Standard and Advanced match keywords as opposed to Broad/Phrase/Exact.>

You now have 3 options:

1. Fix Issues and Import: You will be shown your account structure with tabs for each settings/keywords/ads/etc.. Red outlines will show where attention is needed. When completed, your Yahoo account will be 100% compatible with AdCenter.

2. Import only compatible data: If there is an compatibility issue between the Yahoo and Ad Center structure then ignore it. Upload anything that doesn’t need changing.

3. Import all data later: You may want to select this option if you want to import your account structure from AdWords which is nearly 95% similar to AdCenter and would require only minimal campaign settings adjustments. It will save a copy of your Yahoo account to a csv file.

From here you are brought to screen which says: Transfer your Yahoo! Search Marketing accounts to Microsoft adCenter and a drop-down box which will allow you to select the adCenter account under the login you used to transfer to. The problem here is that AdCenter Will Not let me continue. After testing with 3 accounts the process gets derailed here. We are currently waiting on a response from the AdCenter team but we suspect that take some time with all of the questions advertisers are going to have.

I know the first thing that entered my mind when I read transfer any remaining account balance to Microsoft for the purpose of Microsoft was: Does this mean that Yahoo is finished as of today? Absolutely not. You need to continue advertising in Yahoo!. When exactly the funds from Yahoo! will be transferred is still vague though and another question we are waiting on.

http://www.yadvertisingblog.com/blog/2010/08/31/advertisers-begin-your-account-transitions

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.

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I personally am looking forward to this transition as management will become a bit easier. I do have my concerns about the numerous advertisers who are now going to flood AdCenter. My particular concern revolves around the campaign imports. The vast majority of advertisers use Google and I see no reason anyone would go through the effort of modifying their Yahoo account when they can import their Google account in minutes. This means that instead of the low CPC bids from Yahoo being used, the Absurdly high CPC bids from Google are going to flow into AdCenter. Only time will tell if my concerns are warranted?

microsoft adcenter, Search Alliance, Yahoo

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

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