One of my colleagues today found out that if you edit a short description in Yahoo Sponsored Search, you have to include a period at the end. Usually you’re allowed 70 characters for the short description, but with the ending period, we’re all being cheated out of one character. If your ads are already 70 characters then don’t worry, they will continue to be active, but next time you edit them, they will be required to have an ending period.

One character doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re trying to get creative as well put across the right message and appeal to the right audience, every character counts. I have no idea why they decided to implement this, there’s a ton of other stuff that I would prefer them to do, like make the campaign import feature available for advertisers who are not at the Gold or Platinum spending levels.

I was looking at a couple of accounts that were converted in December 2006 and something caught my eye. The daily spending performance report is not showing the correct amount in the Account Daily Spending Limit column. It currently shows the right amount up to the day the account was converted, then $0 after that. After a short call to the nice people at Yahoo, they confirmed that there’s a bug in the display on this report. The account is functioning correctly, the values just aren’t showing on the report.

Congrats to the Eric and the rest of the MyBlogLog guys! You can read more about this on their own blog.

I signed up for this not so long after I created this blog and I really like the functionality. It provides referrer and traffic information, but more importantly, it gives you a face roll widget that you see on the left column here. This is a much more fun way of seeing actually who is reading your stuff (as long as they’ve signed up to mybloglog).

I wonder what’s in store for those guys, once they move to their new snazzy apartments in San Fran. I wish them the best of luck and am looking forward to seeing what else they’re able to roll out with the big Y behind them.

My mailbox was flooded with a bunch of emails from Yahoo over the holidays. In the next week or so, a bunch of accounts will automatically be upgraded to the new Panama system. If you do not have an online marketing consultant managing this for you, don’t fear; you really don’t have much to worry about. If you don’t get to it right away, the ads will still show and you’ll still get traffic. The only real disadvantage is that you won’t be able to use the new keyword tool, geotargeting or other cool features straight away.

The upgrade notification email mentions that the upgrade may take up to 8 hours to complete, well for most accounts, which have a few hundred keywords, it’ll be literally minutes. Once the upgrade is complete you’ll get another email with the new login URL, which doesn’t use a login capture (hurray for roboform users!).

Good luck with the upgrade, I’m sure you’ll love the new interface and features.

Lee Odden from TopRank interviewed John Slade from Yahoo about the new Panama
PPC platform (read the interview). He gives us some insights into its current capabilities and what lies ahead. Specifically he mentions geo, demographic and behavior targeting, Panama’s handling of rich media, goal tracking and campaign management features as well as opening up its distribution to other broadcast media such as TV.

While I’ve gotten my feet wet with Panama, I’m certainly looking into playing with some of these features when they become available.

Webpronews also interviewed John at Pubcon this year.

When writing ads, I always check, doublecheck and triple check the ad copy. The worst thing I could do as a consultant for another company would be to put a spelling mistake into their ad. It could possibly tarnish their reputation or push users in the wrong direction. So while checking up on some spam email I found this Yahoo ad.

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.

Step 1

Step 2

You can see that as well as the london terms, it’s also picked up others like [europe airfare] and [airfare paris]. So to keep this adgroup focussed, I went back and added the qualifier [london] which must appear in the results.

Ok now I get a much better list, but it still contains terms like [car rental in london] so be careful not to just add the entire list to the adgroup. Note that the results are now expanded to 50 phrases, from 30 in the old version.

For comparison, here’s some results using the Overture Keyword Selector Tool for the term [airfare to london]:

Notice that the Overture Keyword Selector Tool provides volume in numbers, whereas the new Panama keyword tool only provides a graphic. For reference, this tool and the one found in the current dtc.overture.com provide the same phrases and volume numbers – I just used this screenshot as it was a little more compact.

Comparing sets of keyword results between the old and new tools may be a topic for another post, however, I can tell you for now that it still only returns singular versions.

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.

It’s also very clear now that you have separate bids for sponsored search and content match and the screen layout is much more intuitive. The system uses a lot of ajax gizmos to flip between the keyword list and list of ads, as well as in the new keyword research tool. This makes the system overall a lot more responsive and is a very nice mix of html/forms/ajax.

It also has a download campaign feature which allows you to save your settings as a zipped csv file. This time it just prompts you to download and save it, there’s no option to open it in Excel.

The account also has an Alert notfication which follows you around as you navigate through the various screens. I managed to trigger 2 alerts when put a typo in the destination URL for one of my ads. It caught it and flagged the ad as offline. Nice little feature to give you (near) instant feedback, however, now those two messages follow me, eventhough I’ve rectified the issue. I wish I could mark them as read like in most email clients, until I can figure out how to make them go away, I will be forever reminded of my destination url typo.

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.

I did rewrite some ads and make various other minor changes, but to my frustration, I couldn’t find out how to move a keyword from one adgroup to another within the same campaign. This seemingly simple task would make account management after the conversion/upgrade process a lot less painful.

As before each ad that is edited, additions and changes to the keywords are sent in to the approval process.

I saw a demo of the geotargeting feature at pubcon but did not yet get a chance to try it out. The account I was using does not particularly have any need to segment its audience geographically.

One new and very important addition is an Analytics package. It is much more complicated to install than Google Analytics as there may be anywhere up to 4 or 5 different scripts that need to be installed, depending on exactly what you want to track. I downloaded the 70+ page pdf tutorial and scanned it to look at exactly how it works. It uses javascript snippets and tracking variables in the URL, very similar to Google Analytics utm_ variables.

Once I’ve gone through all the campaigns and adjusted the ads, adgroups and keywords I will take a look at Yahoo Analytics and run a couple of tests to see if it can do things like track conversions across multiple domains, as well as compare stats between it and Google Analytics.