Reuben Yau

As we suspected, a Yahoo Index update is under way.

http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000387.html

The keyword research tool is really very nice now. It includes a couple of filters so you can specify definitely included words and excluded words. For example, if I’m setting up an adgroup for a client who sells flights to London, England, I have to enter three words or phrases. In this example I enter [airfare to london], [flight to london] and [airline ticket to london]. It now gives me a list of 50 keywords to choose from. (more…)

Since my first peek at Yahoo’s Panama, and after having spoken to some nice Panama support people I understand how the new adgroups are formed. The converted adgroups contain a collection of keywords which use identical ad copy. Sometimes it’s able to create a relevant title for the adgroup, othertimes it labels it as KEYWORD 00001, where keyword is one of the terms within the adgroup.

I also did not like the fact that you could not move an already approved keyword from one adgroup to another (even in the same campaign). However, the Panama approval process is now just a matter of seconds to get a keyword approved, so it’s no big deal to delete from one adgroup and add it to another. (more…)

Matt wrote an amusing article debunking the theory that Google is in bed with the CIA. In this fictitious dialog between a Google PR person and a Google founder, why would the founder admit anything to a lowly PR person. Wouldn’t they be one of the last people you’d want to spill the beans to? Perhaps Google really is working with the CIA, they just can’t officially confirm or deny it.

I’m going to put on my tinfoil hat and head home for the night :)

Today I manged to upgrade a Yahoo Sponsored Search account to use the new Panama system. The upgrade was relatively painless, however, I discovered a few quirks in the system. The first thing that you should know is that the overall structure is now very much like Google AdWords, even sharing the same terminology (campaigns and adgroups) and it also has the dynamic keyword insertion tool which can be used in the ad title and description.

When you upgrade a campaign all of your existing categories will be converted into campaigns. Each campaign will then have a number of adgroups which will contain various sets of keywords. I only managed to spend about an hour with the new system, but I could not figure out if the adgroups came about because it was grouping specific keywords together or whether it had something to do with the ad copy. The answer may lie within the online documentation, but I didn’t have time to investigate. (more…)