We all like to save money, and even though I’ve mentioned in the past how you can lower CPCs, I thought I will share a couple quick and simple ways you can make the money you’re spending on search work a little harder.

Paying By Credit Card: Most people try to get on an invoicing plan with the search engines whenever they can, but I try to stick to credit cards as often as possible.  Why?  Because the credit cards I use pay me in points, and those points can be used for all sorts of other work expenses.  If you’re budgets are big enough those points could even pay for some or all of your corporate travel!

Bing Cashback: Bing literally pays people to search by using cash back incentives when the people buy from a PPC ad.  This works by the advertiser giving a discount on a product, and Bing using that discount to entice people to save money when they’re looking to purchase items you carry.  The best part for advertisers is a percentage of your PPC spending from Bing gets deposited into a cashback account that you can use for those discounts.  So sign up, and encourage people to save.

Fraud Credits: Click fraud is inevitable, and most engines will give you a monthly credit back for some click fraud.  Most of the time they see it up front and don’t even charge you for it.  However, it does happen, and when it slips through the cracks you can file a claim to get some money back.  This post about click fraud shows you how.

Have your own ideas?  Share them in the comments, and help others put their money to work!

If you haven’t heard me say it before, let me say it now: Although PPC is cutting edge marketing that is quickly becoming more and more mainstream, its roots lie in one of the oldest forms of marketing: direct marketing.  We know this through credit card offers, infomercials, and any other piece of marketing material that passes before you and asks you to “order today”, “apply online”, “operators are standing by, so call now”.

There is a reason why Billy Mays always told you to call now.  There is a reason why credit card offers tell you to apply online or call to speak to a representative.  These calls to action are best practices, and they hold true with paid search ads that you see on Google, Yahoo and Bing.

It shouldn’t surprise me when search engines use their own direct marketing to achieve goals, but it did surprise me when I opened an envelope that was sent from Google only to see it was an ad for enterprise level Google Apps.  It contained a letter explaining the benefits of using Google Apps, and a calculator to show how much you could save a year by switching to Google Apps, based on the number of employees you have.  The approach was intriguing, but in all honesty my initial reaction was “What?!  Google is sending junk mail?!”  Why would a company that makes billions by building a system that allows for ultra-targeting suddenly go to broadcast junk mail from segmented lists?

I’m not questioning the marketing prowess of the Google Apps team, in fact I think they probably have excellent reasons for pursuing this tactic.  However, I suspect this is an internal beta to see if Google can successfully mine their database of hundreds of millions of people to develop targeted lists for more generalized forms of marketing to feature in AdWords.  Consider for a moment the information that Google knows about its users on a query-by-query basis:

• Search History: Google knows what you search for in the past and can combine that history to make assumptions about your hobbies, interests, likes, dislikes, and other personal detail.
• Physical Location: Google knows your physical location by city and/or state based on your IP address (unless you use AOL, who masks everyone behind a single IP address).  If you use a Google Lattitude, then Google knows exactly where you are within a couple feet.
• Previous Sales History: If you use Google Wallet and Checkout, then Google knows what you buy and where you buy it from.  It also means Google has your credit card number on file, which also means Google has your billing/shipping address.  Even if you don’t use Google wallet/checkout, but you do use Gmail, then perhaps your emailed receipts will find their way into your profile with this same information.

The list goes on and on of what Google knows about you when you use their services, but the point is Google can use the information it knows about its users to build some highly targeted and segmented lists that would be of significant benefit to direct mail marketers.  It is not too much of an intellectual leap to assume that Google can build a tool in AdWords that advertisers can use that enlists the help of Google Apps and other services to make direct mail creative, and then pay Google to print and ship the direct mail to your chosen segment of recipients, and then use Google Analytics to track the performance of the campaigns.  To test this theory, I went to the featured URL and looked at the address bar to see if any Google Analytics tracking was added.  Sure enough, the URL auto-filled Google Analytics tracking that looks like this:

utm_medium=dm&utm_source=en-dm-na-us-tco_adw_q110&utm_campaign=us-tco

Let’s break this down piece-by-piece:

• UTM is Urchin Tracking, aka Google Analytics.
• Medium usually refers to the marketing medium, whether it be PPC, display ads, YouTube rollovers, etc.  The fact that it equals “DM” (utm_medium=dm) should be easy enough to assume that DM stands for Direct Mail.
• The Source information includes “EN”, which for Google usually means the language abbreviation for English.  NA-US probably refers to a North American campaign focused on the United States. As for “adw-q110″, there is no way to be certain, but my assumption is that is internal speak for which list my name came from.
• The campaign is what the Google Analytics user is calling the individual marketing campaign.  For example, if Best Buy was having a sale and had 30 display ads all featuring the sale, then those 30 ads would probably have the same campaign tags to monitor performance of the sale.

So let’s assume Google is testing a direct mail campaign that uses their knowledge of people to build mailing lists.  How would this be done?  How would names and addresses be segmented, categorized, and broken down in a way that adds value to marketers?  After all, Google has always targeted people by search query mapped back to bidded keywords in an auction system, which is a lot different than segmentation analysis.  So how could they include demographic segments and teach advertisers how to select them?  Simple! They would use Facebook as a benchmark.

If you have ever played with a Facebook ad, you know you can target people by gender, age, relationship status, page affiliations, etc.  Imagine an Adwords system that does something similar.  Google could even add its own twist to the process by requiring advertisers to bid on how much they’re willing to pay on a conversion basis to use the various portions of the list.  The more relevant your list is to your target audience, the more you’re willing to pay to speak to those potential customers.  The process may look something like this:

1. The advertiser logs into Adwords and creates a new campaign called Direct Mail.
2. The campaign wizard walks the advertiser through targeting mail recipients based on any demographic information known by Google, possibly including sites visited (i.e. news/blog junkie would go to Huffington Post and/or NYTimes.com, while tech enthusiasts would be on TechCrunch, C|Net, and others)
3. The advertiser uploads any graphics or other creative that pertain to the advertiser’s business, and determines their cost per conversion.
4. The advertiser is then shown several templates from Google Docs, and the advertiser picks the ideal layout
5. AdWords shows several top-performing PPC ads based on click rates.  The advertiser writes additional copy based on best performing PPC ads
6. Google offers a specialized landing page created by Google’s Page Optimizer for interested parties to visit, and the advertiser customizes it to fit with the rest of her site
7. Campaign data is uploaded into Google Analytics
8. The advertiser sets postage delivery times and establishes her CPA bid against other advertisers wanting to target a similar audience
9. Google’s systems automatically call up names and addresses based on the advertiser’s chosen segments, prints and labels the mail, and delivers to the post office for delivery.

Since the advertiser is only choosing list segments, Google will never actually share the names and addresses of its users with the advertisers, ensuring the privacy barrier is never broken.  Performance is tracked via Google Analytics, and assuming the recipient converts into a customer, the name/billing information is absorbed into normal sales activity of the advertiser, making it impossible to know which purchasers reacted to the direct mail campaign via Google.

Now I could be making a big deal out of nothing.  After all, this thought process stemmed all from me receiving a single letter in the mail from Google promoting a single product.  However, I highly doubt it will be my last.

The point of this article is not to scare you about what Google knows about you or other users.  They recognize that people take privacy very seriously, and even created their privacy dashboard.  If you’re more interested in the 3rd party review of Google information, SEOMoz has a great resource that walks you through everything that Google can capture about a user, and how it does so.

You have probably seen them numerous times while doing searches: The little sub-links below the main link on Google SERPs.  Those are called SiteLinks, and now Google has a beta in place that lets you include SiteLinks in your ads that reach top position.  Here’s how it works:

In the campaign settings you need to turn on the option of allowing SiteLinks.  A little drop down box will appear that allows you to enter text and destination URLs for several text links. Once active, any keyword that qualifies for top positioning on a regular basis will begin displaying the SiteLinks.  A click on any of the links is charged the same CPC as without the SiteLinks.  From initial testing I have found the CTR to be upwards to 20% higher than the same ad without SiteLinks, so it definitely grabs people’s attention.  The higher CTR typically will help your quality score, and assuming you can continue to keep that top position, your average CPC will actually go down.

The links can be changed anytime, but can only be assigned at the campaign level.  If there are ads that you specifically don’t want SiteLinks included on, then you must duplicate the campaign and have a version running with and without them active.  The ads that you do not wish to have SiteLinks enabled must live in the campaign where the feature has not been activated.

PPCHero suggests using links for seasonal products or a direct link to a contact page.  These are great ideas, but there are plenty of more options.  If you have a complicated conversion structure similar to a travel site, then consider adding links to various parts of your conversion funnel to see what can work when the initial pages are bypassed.

This is still in beta, so you may not have access to it quite yet.  If you really want to try it, call the Google customer service line and ask if you can be included.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but either way it gives you a chance to try out a great feature that you may not have otherwise known about.

For years one has been able to select keywords and have an ad live within mere minutes.  It is what fueled the search marketer’s obsession within instant gratification, knowing that one can start a test and take a lunch break, often to return to the results waiting in the interface.  Organic search has not been ast efficient.  Data needed to be crawled and indexed before it could show up in search results, and that often took days, weeks, or even months.  Now we live in a world where people expect instant gratification from their search results.  Twitter Search became a pulse of real-time feelings from everyday people about almost any given subject, and the professional search engines quickly took note.  Now the big three of Google, Yahoo, and Bing show real-time search results from all over the web, or at least Tweets from big names.

So how does one take advantage of this new realm of real-time search?  Simple, engage in real-time advertising with current content updates on your site.  If you want to blog on a popular topic, or a topic you know will soon become very popular (perhaps a professional golfer’s recent PR disaster), then you can create the campaign in Google/Yahoo before you even write your content.  Here’s how to do it:

• Start a draft of the blog post or page so you have a known URL, or use a URL you know you will be establishing as your URL for the content.  This will be your destination URL for ads.
• Select the main keywords that surround your topic and write a quick ad saying the latest news and information can be found on your site, and then set the campaign status to pause.  Be sure to make the default URL the home page of your site.
• Finalize your content and publish
• Change your destination URL to your content’s page and set your campaign to active. The traffic will start flowing in as little as 15 minutes.

You may be wondering why bother setting up the campaign before writing the content instead of the other way around.  The answer is two words: Editorial Review.  The campaign doesn’t need to be active to trigger an editorial review, so the time it takes you to write and finalize your content should be enough time for your new campaign to get past any editorial checks by the search engines.  The editorial review does need a live and active page, which is why we set the ad to the home page and then change it later.  This means as soon as you’re ready to buy traffic, the engines are ready to sell it to you without any holdups.

The experienced search marketer may say that the URL change will kick off another editorial review, which is correct.  However, that review will be done as the campaign is live, and will only be shut down if the ad doesn’t link to a functioning page.

Another method of engaging in real-time PPC is to buy and pause keywords that you expect you may need later.  The New York Times does this with the published names of Hurricanes for the following season, so if that hurricane becomes a news maker, they can drive traffic to the article instantly.

The advantage is you can get a leg-up on your competition who may need to wait until their updated pages get indexed.  You may have to wait for that too, but incorporating these tactics will allow you to catch some of the initial swell of traffic that always occurs when a story breaks.

best practices with shopping enginges

OK.  We’re past Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday.  I told you what to expect during the holidays with PPC accounts, and now we’re talking shopping channels.  These are where some people go when they know exactly what they want and they’re looking for one thing, and one thing only: Bargains.  There are dozens of shopping engines out there ranging from Shopzilla, Nextag, Become, ShopWiki, and Shopping.com to name a few.  Just as in regular PPC, there are best practices to ensure an optimum return–or a minimum loss.

Shopping channels are similar to typical PPC because it’s an auction-based system.  It’s different in the fact that you bid and compete on categories instead of keywords. The bids are often in $0.10 increments and positioning is often based purely on bids.  If you’re familiar with paid search on a moderate level, and you are aware of the differences mentioned, then you’ll be on fairly similar turf.  So here are some best practices to make the best of your shopping feed experiences.

Make Sure Feeds Are Updated: There is no faster way to turn someone off of your site via shopping channels than have one price show up on the search results, and then a separate price show up on the product page.  Update your feeds as often as you update your pricing.

Watch Bids Daily: Bidding on shopping channels is almost a pure position play.  If you’re not careful you’ll quickly find your item at the very top of results, or completely off the first page.

Pick Your Battles:  Many competitors will offer stripped down and refurbished models in order to show a lower price.  Compare your product offering to your competitors.  If there is a difference in the package, and you can’t explain it in the description, and you can’t compete with a similar price, don’t bid on the item! Beyond the description you will not have the opportunity to explain the difference in features and benefits on why your offering is superior, so don’t even try.

Watch Out For Popular Items: If one of your items gets a high click-through rate, pull it.  Surprised?  Don’t be.  Shopping sites have a very large network of affiliates and sub-sites, that will all be more than happy to take your successful product and showcase it on your site.  This may sound good at first, but these network sites have no interest in sending you quality traffic, and are promoting your popular product only to get a paid click at your expense.

If after considering these tips you feel you’re ready to dive in to shopping channels, go for it!  But keep an eye on your budgets, and don’t be afraid to pull out of a category if it’s not profitable.

Best Holiday Movie EVER

‘Tis the season to be selling.  So many sites make a large percentage of their income during these last 6 weeks of the year.  For some, it’s even make-or-break–especially with the year we’ve had.  For those of you who spend your day running a business instead of PPC accounts, here is a brief rundown of what you can expect to see in your PPC accounts when you do have time to check them:

More competition:  This is probably the most obvious, but you need to consider what more competition means.

• Higher costs per click
• Lower click-through rates
• Budgets that dry up before you realize it

This year I have seen a huge drop in click prices almost across the board.  I suspect that people that not only did they get smarter with what keywords they were bidding on, but that they lowered their monthly budgets to build up their year-end war chest.  If this is correct, then it means you can expect much fiercer competition at levels that seem outright ridiculous.  Click costs can rise 2-3x within days, and if you don’t respond in kind your traffic will disappear as your ads are relegated to page 3 of results.  But don’t forget to raise daily budgets, otherwise your money will be spent much faster due to the more expensive clicks eating up that money.

Keep an eye on daily budgets and Impression Share:  In Google you can run an account report and view impression share as a selectable metric.  Right now I want you to login into your account and run this report broken down by months for the entire year.  Look at your average impression share.  Review this information daily during your busy season to make sure this number doesn’t drop off .  If you see it declining, consider raising your daily budgets.

TIP: If your campaign settings are set to accelerated spend, meaning Google will serve your ads as often as possible until your budget is depleted, then you can run an hourly impression report to see what time of day your ads typically go offline.  By doing some simple math you can determine how underfunded your accounts are to achieve an 80-90% impression share (you’ll never achieve 100%).  If you can afford to increase your budgets to to achieve the higher impression rate and get more traffic, then you should see a spike in your conversions (assuming your conversion rate stays constant)

Watch out for competitors bidding on your Trademarked terms: Competitors will try to steal your branded traffic.   Some will bid on your name, and others will even include your name in their ads.  If you have a registered trademark, and you see a competitor using your name or the keyword insert function on your TM as a bidded term, you can file a complaint to Google and they will shut down the ad.  In Yahoo you can have competitors banned from advertising on that term all together.  In both cases you will need your trademark registration number for the engines to even talk to you about this complaint.

Lower Conversion Rates, Followed by Higher Conversion Rates:  If you’re a retailer, this will drive you mad for the first week or two of the holiday season.  Consumers will spend a lot of time shopping across various sites getting gift ideas and looking for the best deals.  This means that conversion rates typically drop.  However, two weeks into the season you’ll start seeing the conversion rate jump.  Once this happens be ready to boost your campaign budgets to capture as much of that traffic as you can.

Huge Traffic Spikes from Shopping Engines:  If you’re not on Google Base, Shopzilla, Nextag, Become.com, and many of the other shopping sites yet, open accounts now.  Google base is free, and if you ask nicely you may get your Google Base and AdWords account linked, so some product images will show up in your ads.  It’s a limited beta that may be closed, but if you can get in the click-through rates will be phenomenal.

Lastly, keep an eye on the content network.  If you are running any ads on any of the engine’s networks, stay focused on the conversion rate.  Kill it as soon as the conversion rates drop (which it usually does, but not always) and transfer that money to search.

Next week I’ll discuss how to get the most out of the shopping engines.  Here’s a hint: You rarely want to promote your best product.

You may or may not be aware, but in New York City this week is a little convention called SMX East.  This is one of the famous conferences put on by Danny Sullivan and team.  SMX East usually draws a big agency crowd, but as with so many conferences, is a great place for companies to make announcements and try to one-up each other.

So far, Yahoo I think has the biggest news.  In a blog post it announced a ton of big updates, include Rich ads in search, Network Distribution reporting (to show which websites are actually serving your ads), and my favorite, the Yahoo Desktop Publishing tool.  FINALLY!

Y! Desktop Publisher

I’ve been part of the beta for quite some time, and it’s been killing me not to talk about it due to NDAs, but now that it has been made public, I can go into a little detail.  It runs on the Adobe Air platform, which makes it look really pretty, but runs fairly slow.  Yahoo makes great use of the real estate with expandable tabs for research and side windows to display secondary–yet still important–data about the campaigns and ad groups.  It’s almost too busy with as much data displayed as possible, but I see that as a feature more than a bug.  In fact, there is so much data being displayed I couldn’t even show screenshots without making it look like a declassified government document that’s been blacked out that it’s virtually useless.  The downside is it’s slow, and still acts more like a Yahoo bulk sheet instead of Adwords Editor.  It’s still a huge improvement over having nothing, but my main warning is to check the error sheet in the upload section of your Yahoo account, because I occasionally find stuff that doesn’t pop up as an error in the Desktop Publisher.  Oh well, it’s still in private beta.

Google Mobile Search & Local Search

There has been a ton of announcements this week surrounding mobile search.  Adsense will allow website publishers to post mobile ads (Adwords has allowed iPhone/smartphone targeting for some time now in the campaign settings), and announced an Android deal with Verizon. This means that Verizon will be the largest American network to carry Google Mobile OS phones.   This also opens up the realms to much better location-based advertising.  However, for any of this to mean anything, Google’s location-based advertising needs to stop sucking.

Meta Keyword Tag is Dead

If you remember search in the 90s, relevancy was often no more than how often the keyword showed up on a page.  This led to someone trying to get to the top of a SERP for the term “shoes” to write a page that went something along the lines of “shoes, shoes, shoes.  We have lots of shoes. We have blue shoes, red shoes, old shoes, new shoes.”  Then they would stuff their meta keywords tag with all those same keywords so engines knew that’s what keywords you thought were important to the page.  Google was the first to stop using it, and even told people to stop sueing each other over it.  Well, during a SMX panel this week, Yahoo said that they stopped considering meta keyword tags for search rankings several months ago, which means none of the big 3 players use it.  What this means to you is if you have a limited time to do your own SEO and can’t afford a pro, don’t bother with the meta keywords tag.  It will literally be a waste of your time.

On a more humorous side, I got a kick out of this admittance from Google’s CEO about how sometimes Larry and Sergey buy companies and don’t tell him until after the fact. Apparently Sergey found Keyhole (now Google Earth) on the web, bought the company, then later walked into Eric’s office and mentioned it.  Eric’s response: “‘for how much, Sergey?’ And it turned out to be a few million.”

For more SMX coverage, you can check out Search Engine Land’s daily recaps for Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3.

Quality scoring is a black box.  Everyone involved knows it’s important, but some people consider it important enough to optimize for it while others go on about their day and accept the score they get, come what may.  Regular readers of these posts may realize that I am one to fall in the latter of the two camps, because I focus on conversions and not click-throughs in almost all cases.  After all, the quality score is how qualified the engines think your keyword and ad is to make them money.

Regardless of the tips I present below, I firmly believe that last statement.  The quality score is there for the engine’s benefit and not ours as advertisers.  It’s the engines grading us on how profitable we are for them.  If we’re not profitable enough with a high CTR, they charge us more.  However, is the quality score graded on a scale or on a curve?  If it’s on a scale then you can do everything right and get an “A” and be happy with your high score.  If it’s graded on a curve then your final grade is dependent on the performance of others.  If you do better than they do, you score high.  If you do worse, you score low.  In other words, your ability to write better ads with higher relevance than your competitor impacts your quality score.

Consider this: You have a quality score of 5 and your competitor with identical keywords and bids has a quality score of 10.  Since the keywords are identical the relevancy to the raw search query should be the same, meaning the only difference is the ad copy.  They have an awesome ad and you don’t, so their quality score is higher.  Typically, this means that they can get a click at the same position as your ad for a lower cost per click.  If they can spend less money per click, they can afford to go after more traffic, which means they have more opportunity to score conversions.  More conversions means more cash to fuel future Adwords spending and continued sales growth.

Do I have your attention now?  Good.  Here’s how to optimize your ad groups for quality score:

Keep your keyword count in ad groups between 25-50.  This includes match type variations of the same term.  This isn’t a steadfast rule, but is a good rule-of-thumb.  If you have more, make sure that they are keywords that focus around a very tight central theme.

Don’t bid on broad match.  Keeping everything to phrase and exact match will limit how likely it is for Google to match your keywords to an irrelevant term.  Remember, Google’s definition of relevancy may not be the same as yours.  (If you really want broad match, put it in a different ad group).

Separate your misspells.  If you use the dynamic keyword insertion in your ads, misspells will show up in the headline.  This will hurt your quality score, not help it.  Keep them separate and use the correct spelling of the term in the ad copy.

Don’t use dynamic keyword insertion in ads.  Surprised?  Why?  If you keep the keyword counts low in the ad group, you can write the ad to include those keywords.  Having an exact match term as a keyword and in the ad text without Google injecting it shows maximum relevance.  Besides, with everyone and their mother using the DKI these days, it doesn’t have anywhere near the CTR boost that it used to.

Now before you go off and redesigning your accounts to optimize for quality score, consider this: some of your terms will already have a high quality score.  If you have a couple terms in ad groups that score poorly (like 5-7) and some terms that score well (8-10), then simply remove those poorer terms and put them in their own ad group.  Copy your better converting ad from the original to include in the new ad group and bam!  You have a higher average quality score already.

Ad copy is a unique aspect of the search campaign because it is the only part that the visitor can interact with. Marketing Sherpa estimates say that a searcher will spend only 0.7 seconds on average reviewing an ad, yet in that small amount of time you must:

• Grab the searcher’s attention against 10 organic links and 9-11 other paid links
• Describe the product/service you provide in a manner relevant to the search query
• Have an enticing call-to-action that tells the searcher what is expected of them after they click on the ad.

The ads need to be attention-getting and relevant, but also describe who will benefit from the site after s/he clicks on the ad. As an example, imagine each ad being a closed door with a peephole. The relevance of the ad determines the size peephole to look through, and the quality of the ad is how many appropriate people will be enticed enough to walk through the door. If all these are being performed correctly, it should provide the optimum combination of clicks and conversions, which leads to cheaper CPAs, cheaper clicks, and lots of profit.

TIP: It is very rare to want as many people to click on an ad as possible. Writing copy that qualifies an ideal visitor will tell some people that the site is not for them.

There are several online marketing metrics that don’t have the same relevance in search that they do in other fields. For example, CTR is important to banner ads because the advertiser pays for each 1,000 impressions. CTR in search varies based on each client’s goals, and sometimes won’t play a large role in making decisions within an account. The primary reason to use CTR is if you don’t have conversion tracking enabled. If this is not the case the conversion rate and the Return Of Ad Spend (ROAS) should be your key performing indicators.

Character Limits

The engines are more similar than different when it comes to ad display requirements. Here is a basic list of each engine and their maximum requirements:

Writing Effective Ad Copy & Headlines with Calls to Action

Headlines are in a different color and will be the first part of the ad a person sees. Having this stand out will be ideal to get attention. The best method of standing out is to do something that the other advertisers aren’t doing. This may require using a keyword insert function, but it may also mean to not use a keyword insert when everyone else is. It may also simply be to use a unique style of writing that others aren’t incorporating, like asking a question or even being a little silly. Always keep in mind that it has to be copy that you won’t mind if the client sees while doing their own search, so keep it clean and inoffensive. You should also avoid the use of fragment ideas or concepts, because the short number of characters should be used to complete a full sales pitch.

The description line is the place to back up a claim made in the headline, and/or to give detail about the advertised product or service. It is also the ideal place to add exclusive language to ensure that only the quality traffic is coming to the site. For example, if a client is a networking company for large businesses, a lot of the keywords used by a large business will also be used by consumers and small businesses. By saying “Designed for businesses with 200+ employees” a consumer and the small business will instantly know the ad is not for them. At the same time it will make a searcher at a large business more interested since they know they are the targeted audience.

The display URL acts as a mini-branding function by telling the searcher where the ad will take them. It doesn’t have to be the same as the landing page URL (which will sometimes be very long) and gives some leeway into bending some of the editorial policy rules.

Exclamation points and capitalized words are not allowed in ads. Only one exclamation point can be used within the ad copy of an ad, and one shouldn’t use superlatives like “best”, “greatest”, “lowest”, or “cheapest” without the claim being backed up on the landing page of the ad. This can be worked around, since Google only actively monitors terms like “#1″, “Top”, and “Lowest”.

TIP: If you upload ad copy via AdWords Editor for Google, you can bypass some of the regulations for a limited amount of time. It will let you upload individual words as capital letters. So try saying “FREE” instead of “Free”, and see if it has any impact on your conversion rates.

Using KeyWord Insert Functions

All three engines allow the option to include the search term into a headline or ad automatically to increase relevancy. Studies by Google suggest that using keyword insert increases the click-through rate (CTR) for an ad by varying amounts. The search engines want a high CTR because that’s what they get paid on: clicks. Otherwise the ads take up valuable screen space and don’t generate revenue, which is why the engines typically penalize low CTRs.

By adding the Keyword insert function into an ad, it usually guarantees a part of the ad will placed in bold, which often catches the eye of the searcher. However, as the practice has grown and is being used by less experienced advertisers, some use it as a shortcut for not creating tight ad groups and to still get parts of the ad placed in bold.

TIP: Creating a tightly knit ad group gives more reason to use keyword insert because it will make the rest of the copy more relevant to the keyword being included in the copy.

Keyword inserts don’t always work. One must always consider the character limits on the ad copy while considering using the keyword insert feature, since some search strings can go beyond the 25 or 35 character limits. The engines require a backup to display in case the search query is too long. He backup is the description after the colon mark within the brackets:

{KeyWord:Buy Black Shoes}

A space is not needed after the colon because that would tell Google to place a space before the word “Buy”, which will waste a character and will get chopped off anyway.

Google Ad Copy

Google requires two unique lines of text that can run up to 35 characters each. Previous experience shows that ads usually perform better when each line is an independent sentence instead of one sentence running across both lines. Typically the headline serves as a stand-out function that tries to separate it from the other ads. The goal is to be relevant to the search query and visible to the searcher. When an ad has the same keywords as the search query, Google puts those keywords in bold within the ad. This is often done by using a keyword insert function that takes the search query and inserts it into your ad and instantly making it bold. However, as everyone tries to stand out by using this function, they all begin to look the same. In order to truly stand out one can remove that common factor and be a successful ad without having anything in bold.

Yahoo Ad Copy

Yahoo currently allows 40 characters in the headline with 70 characters in the description line. There are two primary differences between Google and Yahoo copy:

1. Google breaks its 70 character limit up into 2 lines of 35 characters, where Yahoo has one line of 70 characters that automatically wraps to a second line as space requires.
2. Yahoo allows for alt text for dynamic headlines. These allow for more control over what appears with a keyword, if the search query exceeds the character limit.

TIP: Yahoo strongly recommends the use of keyword insert to all advertisers. If your conversion rate is starting to dip on otherwise strong copy, try replacing the dynamic headline with a static headline .

Try using the same ad copy on all three engines simultaneously. This will limit the amount of time needed to run statistically relevant ad copy tests due to the higher impression, click, and conversion data.

MSN Ad Copy

MSN took the basic concept of Google’s ad system like testing, geo-targeting, and keyword-insert, and expanded it. The character limits are the same as Google’s, but instead of two description lines of 35 characters MSN has one description line of 70 characters that will automatically wrap to the second line. Visually this makes all of the ads look left justified compared to Google’s which look force justified. Along with keyword insert, MSN allows for a new feature called dynamic text for each keyword. The premise is that one can change the standard order-level ad copy to better fit a specific keyword. This will typically benefit eCommerce sites with large volumes of product pages that want each product page as a landing page for a keyword.

MSN Dynamic Text Example

In the above example the name of the order group was put in the headline as a Parameter to emphasize a larger sale than one that would only benefit the searcher, and help the advertiser know what sale language caught the searcher’s attention. The keyword insert function was used early in the ad to draw attention and increase relevancy to the searcher, showing that the site has exactly what she is looking for. Finally, a third parameter of price was included so that the searcher knows exactly what she will find when getting to the site.

Using Price in Ad Copy

There is a debate of whether one should or shouldn’t include the price of an item in the ad copy. The argument against is that if the searcher has seen it for less somewhere else, regardless if it is not an exact item match, then she will ignore the site completely. This can be bad for both parties if there are additional rebates or other offers that the searcher wasn’t aware of before clicking on the ad. The argument for including cost is it tells the searcher up front what they’re expected to do and what it will cost them, which should increase the conversion rate. However, one would have to test different ad copies to see if the overall revenue generated with mentioning cost is greater or lower than not mentioning the cost. This will be shown in more detail later. Generally speaking, if the price is above certain psychological levels, or above the price of competitors in the same advertising space, don’t put the price in the copy. If the price is lower than competitors, and the average shopper knows that price is a good deal, then put it in the copy.

Whatever you write for your copy, keep in mind that the headline has to relate to the keyword, the copy has to relate to the headline and sell, and the landing page needs to relate to the copy to avoid a disconnect between you and the searcher. If you have suggestions beyond what is written here for successful copy, please feel free to share it via the discussion.

You can find hundreds or even thousands of best practices guides for AdWords, but there seem to be very few that are written for Yahoo.  I assume that you will know some of the Google ones, as this post will essentially just show the differences between Yahoo best practices and Google best practices.  If you need a refresher, check out some of these articles:

Ad Group Organization:

As in Google this should be done by the similarity of keywords (as opposed to similarity of definitions), however, it should also be done by keyword volume.  For example, if you have a campaign featuring all the colors of cars and trucks in your showroom, you should not just have and ad group for “car colors” and “truck colors”, but break these down even further to “High Volume Car Colors” and “Low Volume Car Colors”.  I haven’t found an advantage of cutoff points at specific limits, but for ease of design, I use 10,000 queries per month as my litmus test.  Keywords with more than 10,000 get into a high volume ad group, and keywords with less than 10,000 go into another ad group.  The query count can be found within the keyword tool in your account.

Ad Copy:

Yahoo has 40 character headlines instead of Google’s 25 character limits.  Use the headline as your call to action, with the body including your normal marketing message.  This inspires those who are attracted to the headline to follow through with the called-upon action.  Calls to action typically include a verb like “buy”, “save”, “order”, and can also include a time connotation like “now”, “today”, or “before 9/05″.

Also, no matter how tightly knit your ad copy is to your ad groups, you should almost always include the keyword insert.  Their systems love keyword inserts and it will almost always raise your quality score.  Like Google, higher quality scores mean better positions for cheaper clicks.

Landing Page:

Keyword-level landing pages is ideal.  Your conversion rate will be higher and Yahoo will give your ads higher quality scores if ALL the keywords within an ad group have a keyword-based landing page.  It can be the same page for all keywords, but they should all have it.  Remember what I said about high quality scores on ads?

The Long Description

Back in the day Yahoo had two types of ads: a short description and a long description.  The long description would allow 180 characters and be shown when your ad ranked high enought to be seen above search results instead of along the right side of search results.  It would also be the default ad copy for the content network.  This is no longer the case.  It’s dead.  Even if you fill it out you still need to write the short description ad, which will be shown for everything.  Don’t waste your time and just leave it blank.

Ad Testing:

Yahoo loves for ads to be tested, even if you know one will perform better.  Try to always have 2-3 ads in there, as it having a test ad does seem to impact quality scores of both ads.  Naturally they want the ad optimizer to be turned on (which optimizes based on how they’re paid: CTR), but I prefer to leave it off.  Play with it and determine which works better for you.

Hopefully this helps you optimize your Yahoo ads.  If you have any questions please feel free to leave them in the comments and I’ll answer them for all to see.