When modifying or creating a second ad group (sorry, not the first ad group) you’ll now see a little piece of text pop up to inform you that you can do dynamic keyword insertion in your title, or description text in Yahoo’s PPC service. Clicking on this pops up a window that instructs you on how to use this, and asks for you to insert the default text.

Doing so then auto-creates and inserts the {keyword:default text} command. A nice feature.

Another feature they’ve also implemented is the ability to set bids for individual keywords, you simply enter the keywords in the format “my keyword phrase ** 1.0″, just like in Google. What this means is that it’s really handy for copying keywords from Google into the new Yahoo (assuming you want the spend amounts to be the same). The downside to doing this? It seems that their ‘click estimator’ slider doesn’t like it when you have any keyword specific pricing, so it just refuses to show any estimates.

The last item that I’m going to mention… You can now see the quality score (index) for your ad. It’s a 5 section bar, with 5 full bars being top quality. It’s nice to see this kind of openness, it gives you an idea as to where you may be having issues with your PPC campaigns.

All in all, nice features Yahoo.

I joined up with MyBlogLog about 3 weeks ago, it’s a great site for sharing blogs, and for building up reader communities (it appears that way after 3 weeks anyway). Well, tonight they have just announced that they’ve been sold to Yahoo for somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 - $12 million. Not too shabby for a company that started up in July of last year…

With the recent launch of the new Yahoo PPC engine - Panama - I’ve been playing around a fair bit, trying to see exactly what’s different, what’s good and what’s not so good, that’s mostly going to be covered in another post. What I’m going to point out here is that there are differences in campaign creation on Panama. When you first create an account, and by default your first campaign, you are given a 5 step process to walk walk through.

However, when you create any subsequent campaigns, it expands out to an 8 step process.

So what’s the difference? Well, for your first campaign you aren’t given the ability to name either your campaign or ad group, instead you have to wait until after you’ve created them, then edit them. Also on the initial setup you’re limited to entering a maximum of 50 keywords, for subsequent campaigns you can enter a max of 500 keywords to start. This is kind of strange when you think about it. For the majority of small businesses that don’t have much experience, but decide to try out Yahoo’s PPC system they could believe that they’re limited to 50 keywords and they may have confusion over how to rename the campaigns / ad groups. I can see that they want to make things easier for someone signing up, and by eliminating 3 steps maybe it does appear that way, although asking to name your campaign & ad group wouldn’t add much of to the process, and I still don’t quite understand why there is a 10 fold difference in the number of keywords that you can enter to start (maybe someone slipped up and missed a zero out in the code?).

Congratulations to Mike the Internet Guy whose blog was voted the best local search blog of 2006 by Search Engine Journal readers.

Hmm, maybe I have another BHAG for 2007

Additional: Lee Odden has put out a list of SEM blogs over on his site. Currently Mike the internet guy isn’t on there, despite winning the award…

Certain businesses such as Bed & Breakfasts, Hotels, etc. understand that their customers come primarily from out of the local area. Others such as those in the service industry - plumbers, roofers, etc. understand that their customers come from only the local area. But what about the rest? Do those businesses understand that their customers may be a mix of local, and out of area searchers, and how far out of the area do people come from?

Obviously it depends on their location. Businesses in larger metropolitan areas are going to draw from larger areas. For example, I was working on a PPC campaign for a company in Allentown, PA. geo-targeting them to the Philadelphia area covered the majority of their customers, but expanding that out to central southern PA (Harrisburg, Lancaster, York) also brought them some traffic to their site. Businesses in tourist areas may draw from far away locations, for example a restaurant in Lancaster, PA. looking to do a PPC campaign would want to target areas in New York, and New Jersey, as well as locally, given that large quantities of tourists come down from those areas and may want to plan ahead to figure out where to eat before they come down.

So targeting your PPC campaigns to where your customers come from is an important strategy, just remember to put your location on your keyword buys out of your area, if you’re in York, PA advertising on ‘restaurants’ in the York area is fine, but in New York, you want to make sure that your keyword buy is something along the lines of ‘restaurants in york pa’. Actually in my experience, buying the keyword with the location in it in your market isn’t a bad idea either, as it can generate some decent traffic.

One method of getting nicely relevant links to your local site is to get local bloggers to write about you (either positively or negatively, preferably the former). But how do you find local bloggers? One solution would be to search on a blog service such as Technorati, but even then it can be a needle in a haystack depending on the location you’re looking for (just think how many Springfields there are, or how many different uses of Lincoln there are out there).

A new solution for this problem is a site that officially launched on Jan 1st this year - PlaceBlogger. The intent of this site is to gather together all local sites and allow you to search by location for all blogs that are related to that geography.

So how well does it work? Well, it’s early days, and they do have over 11,000 blogs worldwide registered (the second location behind the US is the UK with 17 blogs), although when you split that down to a community level that’s maybe 4-6 to a city. Naturally some of those blogs are full of good content and are well trafficked, others… not so much. Still as an idea, it’s not a bad one, especially with local being so ‘hot’ right now. I’ll keep an eye on it.

…and I thought xmas was over and done with. Today a package came from Big G with a travel mug and card, thanking me for filling out a survey last month. It’s my favorite color - free

Geo targeting is the ability to deliver your PPC ads to a certain geographical location, with the ad being seen by a user if it’s determined that their IP address puts them in that geographical location. Of course this doesn’t always work, with certain ISPs showing users across the country to be in incorrect locations, such as Ashburn, VA, or somewhere in Florida, but for the most part it works fairly well.

So how do you go about setting up your campaign to geo target? Well, with Google, when you create an account you are given the option of selecting to geo target to countries, states, cities, or even by drawing a boundary on a map.

The new Yahoo (Panama) gives you a graphical map, that colors in the state or DMA selected, very pretty, and very useful.

…and MSN adcenter? Eek, it’s scary. The geo targeting option allows you to select multiple cities from a list. The list is ordered alphabetically by city. There’s no way to sort it any other way, such as by state, so if you want to target several cities in New Jersey, you have to hunt and peck to find those that you’re either looking for, or that may be close to the location you want. Oh, and you can’t target an entire state, the closest you can go is finding all the cities in that state.

With Panama boosting Yahoo, MSN Adcenter has really fallen to the back of the queue. Time for Microsoft to do something about it?

In my last post - Why you want as many campaigns per account as possible - I talked about the reasons for wanting to have as many campaigns per account as you could get. I also mentioned that I was going to post on why you may want to not do so. So here it is…

The first reason would be if you give your clients access to their accounts in the search engines, obviously you then only want them to see the campaigns that they’re paying for, so you have to restrict the accounts to only hold campaigns for those companies.

What about for those companies that only want to see regular reporting that you provide to them, either through the search engine reports, or through some other interface that you provide them with? Well, this is the scenario that allows you to campaign stuff your accounts… but hold on, not all of those campaigns can go in the same account. If you have campaigns that are bidding on the same keyword in the same geographic location, and they’re located in the same account, then as far as the search engines are concerned, they’re for the same company, and therefore should ’share the load’ with only one being shown at a time (based on the search engine and any options that you’ve set, this could mean that the ads show on a rotational basis, or that the one with the higher quality score will show up until its budget runs out, then the second ad will display). Placing these ads in different accounts will solve that particular problem (unless they have the same base domain in the URL, in which case it won’t, but that’s another topic).

So there it is, 2 reasons to split your campaigns across multiple accounts. There are more, such as geographical groupings, product groupings, etc, but those are primarily aesthetic or arbitrary reasons, whereas the 2 reasons I detail are for necessity and optimal performance.

In my last post - How many campaigns to a PPC account? - I talked about how to expand your maximum allowable campaigns in Google beyond the default limit. The question that some may be asking is why would you want to do that?

Well the simple reason is that you may have a particular product or family of products that you wish to market differently to different locations. For example, you could have a much different branding message for product A in New York than you would in Los Angeles. You could set different campaign budgets, based on your marketing plan.

The benefit of keeping these campaigns in the same account is when you’re doing campaign management, especially reporting. Now, you can use a client center, which most of the major engines provide, which ties together a bunch of accounts under one large umbrella account, but that still doesn’t help with the reporting issue, which can be a real monster depending on how many campaigns you are running. To give you an example of the scale of the problem, in my shop we were running with over 160 (pre-Panama) Yahoo accounts. In order to do our twice a week reporting, we had to log into each account, run the report that we needed, and download it. This process was taking over 6 hours to complete, with the amount of time increasing with every client we added. With the accounts now (post-Panama) spread over 10-12 accounts, this reporting has now stabilized at less than 2 hours, and only increases with every 20 or so advertisers that we add, much better than before.

Of course there are reasons to want to split campaigns across accounts, I’ll cover them in my next post.