360Partners: An Exclusive Interview with Yahoo!
360Partners: Tell us about these new tools and how they help clients acquire sales more effectively?
Michael: Recently, Yahoo! released two new tools: day parting & demographic targeting. So far, the feedback we have received from advertisers has been fantastic. Advertisers are seeing a great increase in performance.
360Partners: For those new to the industry, what is day parting? Demographic targeting?
Michael: Day parting helps advertisers during the best hours of the day and the best days of the week. Advertisers can automate the scheduling of their ads, ensuring those ads are running when they have the best chance for conversion. At the same time, advertisers can turn off certain ads at inconvenient times. As an advanced feature of this tool, advertisers can also increase their bids during peak hours of the day. This feature seamlessly streamlines the process so marketers don’t have to waste their marketing dollars.
For example, if advertisers have a product that is primarily used by businesses, they can easily turn off their ads during the weekend. Or, if advertisers didn’t want to turn their ads off completely, they could lower their bids accordingly.
Our demographic targeting tool gives advertisers a real personal touch to their advertising. Advertisers can segment based on gender and/or age. This segmentation lifts the credibility of the advertising, allowing advertisers to create more meaningful relationships with their customers.
Our demographic targeting uses a bid adjustment method. If advertisers know that they get a lot of sales from 18-24 year- old females in the state of Texas, such advertisers can put a premium on their bids, ensuring that 18-24 year-old females in Texas will have an increased chance of seeing their advertisement.
Coupled together, these tools can help advertisers spend their ad dollars effectively and increase their return on investment.
360Partners: How do these targeting mechanisms differ from the other search engines?
Michael: Yahoo offers advertisers the granularity of zip code targeting. Some advertisers have a laser sharp focus on where they want to advertise. For example, an advertiser may see and know the cultural difference between North Austin Texas and South Austin Texas. The advertiser has seen a greater return in North Austin. This advertiser may prefer to advertise in North Austin but not in South Austin. This tool gives advertisers the ability to premium bid at the zip code level. With day parting, we let advertisers decide whether to show ads according to their own time zone, or the time zones of the users.
360Partners: How would these tools help companies that do generate sales leads? E-commerce?
Michael: Some advertisers operate a call center during specific hours of the day. Now, using day parting, advertisers can match their ads to the availability of the call center, resulting in a more developed sales process.
An e-commerce advertiser might have a unique demographic. This advertiser targets a specific gender in a specific age group. Their ads are now better matched than ever before.
360Partners: What mistakes do advertisers make when setting up campaigns inside of Yahoo?
Michael: I’ve seen three common mistakes across a large spectrum of advertisers.
First, they utilize keyword insertion with no alternate text. Keyword insertion means that the customer's search query dynamically appears in the ad’s headline. The problem is that the format of certain keywords doesn’t make for great headlines. For example, an advertiser may be bidding on the term, “man shoe.” Many times, you’ll see ads with these types of headlines where it just doesn’t make much sense grammatically. The alternate text option allows you to put in a variation of the keyword which will resonate better with searchers, like “Men’s Shoes.”
Second, Advertisers are using advanced match without properly utilizing negative keywords. This is causing them to get a lot of unwanted and unrelated traffic.
Thirdly, account structure is a problem with many advertisers. Their ad groups are too big or too scattered. The goal is to have tight ad groups, surrounded by a structured theme, impression size, etc. The result is that advertisers have lower quality scores and higher costs.
360Partners: What other features do you have that can help advertisers?
Michael: Our aim is always to show the right ad to the right user at the right time. We have a lot of new and exciting products and initiatives coming down the pipeline that will help to achieve this goal. One of the most recent is enhancements to our Content Match product which shows advertiser’s ads alongside relevant content within our distribution network. We’ve recently launched some new back end technology designed to improve the relevancy of this type of mapping. We have also lowered the cost of Content Match traffic down to five cents per click, which allows for a lower point of entry for advertisers that want to try out the product. Also, all of the targeting enhancements we discussed for Search are also available for Content Match.
360Partners Summary:
360Partners is excited about the new tools that Yahoo! is now offering advertisers. Some of them, like day parting, have been long overdue having been offered by other engines for a long time. Other features such as the zip code targeting and audience vs. account ad scheduling put Yahoo in the lead in terms of search granularity. 360Partners has implemented and seen great results from these tools. We recommend advertisers take full advantage of these newly designed features.
Michael Aragon has been with Yahoo! Search Marketing since October, 2004. He is currently a Senior Account Manager on the Agency Services Division that works with SEMs and traditional agencies nationwide. He is tasked with managing a book of business comprised of multiple agencies, ensuring that they are working towards achieving their goaled metrics. By reviewing buying cycles, account structure, target demographics, industry trends and market share, he provides recommendations and actionable items which lead to maximizing media buys and ensuring campaign efficiency.
