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Yahoo’s March Madness hoop dreams; recession brand lessons; data’s not everything; 2010 looking up, and more

Calling all bracketologists
March brings with it green beer, spring flowers and, of course, three weeks of hoops hysteria in the form of the NCAA college basketball tournament. This year’s Yahoo! Sports March Madness line-up is stronger than ever, beginning with our seasoned veteran, Tourney Pick ‘Em. The contest pits Yahoo! users against each other and the “experts,” with cash prizes of up to a million dollars on the line. Something new and cool for this year’s tournament is “Predictalot,” an experimental app from the brainiacs at Yahoo! Labs: Predictalot enables fans to make all types of prestidigitations, then assigns odds and lets users buy and sell them like stocks. Yahoo! has also created a dedicated mobile site just for your tournament picks, as well as a new web show, “Bracket Madness Live.” Picking begins this Sunday after the match-ups are announced, and the usual bracket-busting begins Thursday, March 18.

JWT’s top ten lessons recession brand lessons
Those JWT guys sure are into their “top tens.” The global agency spent a year surveying brand and consumer response to the recession, and came up with ten key brand lessons for surviving a downturn. And then they put them all in a book, which you can download for bupkis—well, in exchange for the usual name/rank/serial number data, anyway.

It’s not all about the data?
Yep, that’s what Dax Hamman says in AdExchanger.com’s Displaying Search column. Hamman, the VP of Display Media at iCrossing, says that “Search and analytics data has helped define media programs for some time…Data is essential to this evolution in media.” But, he also says, “As an industry we must remember that we are talking to real people, not just pixels, and real people will always respond better to something that is visually exciting, has sizzling copy or simply makes them say ‘wow’.” In short, creativity’s still king, kids.

High Standards
It may still seem like the Wild West when it comes to digital advertising but, rest assured, the frontier days are over. Today we have high standards, as ClickZ’s Hollis Thomases explains.

2010 looking up for marketing execs
According to a recent survey of more than 400 North American marketing execs performed by the research firm Frost & Sullivan, marketing execs are viewing the glass as at least half full. Budgets remain flat, staffing and processes remain an issue, and the biggest challenge remains the global recession. But, nevertheless, marketers are finding that life can be so sweet on the sunny side of the street.

— Michael Mattis

(Hoops image by Ryan Fung via Flickr, CC 2.0)

Tags: internet marketing, search engine, SEO, Yahoo!

David Pann talks about customer migration and continuing search innovation

How will the search agreement with Microsoft affect Yahoo! advertisers and products? David Pann, VP and general manager of search advertising, told WebProNews Video that the deal is “a win for advertisers with a single buy getting access to more inventory, it’s a win for consumers for a greater relevance, and it’s a win for consumers and publishers since they have greater access to a new set of participation and inventory.” For more from David, watch the video below.

More WebProNews Videos

—The Team

Tags: internet marketing, search engine, SEO, Yahoo!

Case Study: Affiliate marketer profits by fully leveraging the targeting tools of Sponsored Search

Self-proclaimed “retired computer geek” Don Tuttle is a man who’s always tried to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to making money online. His current line of work, commonly known as affiliate marketing, involves using search advertising to send traffic to third-party companies, and when a sale is made, Tuttle gets a commission.

To do this, Tuttle uses all of the popular paid search providers, but he identifies Yahoo! Search Marketing as his favorite, primarily due to its powerful and more extensive targeting capabilities, and to the high quality of customer support. In a business where having access to key information about users—and then using it to reach the right prospects with the right message—is essential to making a profit, Tuttle shows that being bigger is not always better.

Using pay-per-click
In 2005, after a less-than-successful foray into selling items on eBay, Tuttle recognized a growing opportunity in the field of affiliate marketing, and decided to dive in. “I don’t own the products or the companies I promote; I’m more like a commissioned salesman,” he says. Tuttle keeps a close eye on his advertising expenses, to ensure that they don’t exceed the commissions he receives from the traffic that the ads generate. “I’m very bottom-line oriented,” he explains. “Cost-per-conversion is the metric I primarily use. And like a lot of people, I didn’t succeed at first, but once I got the hang of it, I’ve been very happy with pay-per-click advertising, and with Yahoo!.”

Tuttle uses all of the targeting options available to him in the Sponsored Search interface, but identifies geotargeting as the most valuable one to his account. “Yahoo!’s geo-targeting has enabled me to find areas that are hotbeds for what my ads offer, as well as those areas that don’t convert well,” he says. “Being able to stop my advertising in these low-performing areas has probably been the biggest factor in improving my ROI.” Tuttle explains that by picking each state and metro area independently, an advertiser can automatically get statistics on conversions by state and DMA, using the Yahoo! analytics tools.

The campaign scheduling (dayparting) feature has also proved useful to Tuttle’s business: “I’ve found that there are certain things that work better on certain days of the week and at certain times of the day, and once you figure that out it’s pretty consistent across all of the ad networks.”

Adding demographic targeting
Having covered the “where” and the “when” of the traffic he’s targeting, Tuttle also closely monitors the “who,” and makes adjustments to his bidding and ad copy accordingly. “One of the best features that Yahoo! has over Google is the fact that you can get demographic information from the account interface,” he says. “You can get age groups and the male/female ratios of the people searching on your keywords, and you just can’t get that on Google.” Simply by turning on the Demographic Reporting feature, Tuttle had additional options available to him in the Reporting section of the account to provide this transparency. When combined with the free analytics tools in his account, this data became much more valuable. “I was able to learn that although one of my sites was much more heavily trafficked by women, the male visitors actually converted better,” Tuttle continues. “Using this data, I’ve targeted the male audience more strongly by bidding higher for this traffic, and I improved my conversion ratio as a result.”

The Results
Tuttle praises Yahoo!’s excellent customer support: “My Yahoo! rep Justin Hill has been wonderful. I can spend over six figures a year with Google, and I still don’t have a rep. Justin creates campaigns, comes up with new ideas, and runs reports. The campaign results and incredible support have led me to triple Yahoo!’s share of my overall advertising budget.” With Hill’s help, Tuttle recently used the extensive targeting and demographic information to refine his campaigns, with outstanding results. “My expenses were getting out of hand before I did this,” he remembers. “But when I started making better use of geo-targeting, dayparting and demographic targeting, I was able to reduce my overall cost-peracquisition by 40 percent. Anything that improves the transparency of where my clicks are coming from, and what’s working and what isn’t, is pure gold.”

— The Team

Tags: internet marketing, search engine, SEO, Yahoo!

Here are some screenshots of the Shufflepoint product using the API.







We continue to be impressed by the new solutions developers are bringing to market by leveraging the Google Analytics Platform. If you have developed a useful new tool or integration on top of Google Analytics, drop us an email at analytics-api@google.com. If it's innovative and useful we'll highlight it to our readers on this blog.

Tags: analytics, google, internet marketing, search engine, SEO

Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop simplifies multiple campaign management

If you’re an advertiser running more than one campaign, you will probably welcome the new Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop, a free offline tool that lets you spend less time on the tactical details of campaign management, and more on increasing your return-on-investment.

With Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop, it now takes just a few clicks to modify multiple campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads at the same time. And if you get carried away, you can even undo selected changes with no harm done.

Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop puts an intuitive face on five major campaign management tasks:

• Bulk editing: Easily make mass changes to settings such as status, match types and budgets within an intuitive interface; increase or decrease multiple keyword bids; and export your view of keywords, ads, ad groups and campaigns into Excel for use however you wish.
• Campaign transfer: Import your third-party campaign data in one easy step.
• Keyword research: Use our keyword suggestion engine to find and add new, relevant keywords to your campaigns; get URL-based keyword suggestions to increase your keyword relevance and improve your performance; and export the keyword suggestions into Excel to share this information or to add tracking URLs.
• Find, replace and search: Find and replace text in ads, keywords, ad groups and campaigns; search for specific campaigns, ad groups, ads, or keywords in your account; or search for information in any of the account tabs.
• Account performance statistics: Retrieve status and statistics for your account’s impressions, clicks, CTR, cost, ad quality scores and other information.

By using Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop you’ll have more time to analyze campaign performance, test your ads, and do all the other things that can help make campaigns succeed. Or, you could go do something else entirely!

Ready to get started? Download the free Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop, or register now for a webinar that will introduce you to the tool and its benefits.

–-Chris Marlowe, Staff Writer

Tags: internet marketing, search engine, SEO, Yahoo!

Segmenting segmentation; bad tech predictions; activity streams are the new black; consumers using online search for offline research, and more

What segmentation is right for you?
“There are three main types of segmentation,” says ClickZ’s Neil Mason. “Demographic segmentation, behavioral segmentation, and attitudinal segmentation. But which one is best? It really depends on what problem you’re trying to solve.”

The Internet’s doomed—and other bad tech predictions
Writing in Slate, Farhad Manjoo takes on the 1995 prediction that the Internet was doomed to fail, and discusses how you can avoid making bad predictions about technology in the future.

“Activity streams?”
It’s an idea for a new, free, more open Internet model, and it may just be the next big thing. And Yahoo! is right there, innovating. ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick explains what activitystreams are and what they may mean for the future.

Even if you’re brick and mortar, you still gotta be online
This comes by way of Greg Sterling over at Screenwerk. According to a recent poll, 94 percent of consumers did some research online prior to making a purchase. While e-commerce only makes up four percent of U.S. retail sales, people overwhelmingly (61 percent) use Internet search to research a purchase.

Creative Spotlight: Verizon’s “Big Red”
We expect literature and film to be self-reflexive. Art refers to itself. L’art pour l’art, right? For example, in the Oscar-nominated Quentin Tarantino film, “Inglorious Basterds,” nearly every scene is an homage to another film. But advertising? Not usually. Advertising tends to be all about the next big thing with little regard to the advertising of the past. But Verizon has recently released an ad that riffs on the iconic “Big Red” chewing gum TV commercial. It’s pretty clever, though don’t watch it more than once because the jingle will take over your brain (which we guess means that it’s working).

— Michael Mattis

Tags: internet marketing, search engine, SEO, Yahoo!

“No one can do this as well as we can.”

In an informal conversation at the 4A’s conference, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz says that only Yahoo! can offer everything advertisers need for successful digital advertising: science, art and scale.

Tags: internet marketing, search engine, SEO, Yahoo!

Tags: analytics, google, internet marketing, search engine, SEO

Carol Bartz: What Yahoo! offers advertisers

Yahoo! can bring advertisers a combination of strengths that no one else can, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz said in a keynote speech at the 4A’s Transformation 2010 conference today, because only Yahoo! offers them three things: science, art and scale.

Carol, speaking to the advertising industry group in San Francisco, said, “We want Yahoo! to be the partner you turn to for answers and solutions, and most importantly—when you want results.” By providing science, art and scale, Yahoo can help advertisers and agencies master online advertising.

Science
“Science is incredibly important,” Carol said. “Without it, we’re all flying blind.” She said it’s even more important because the Internet is moving so fast that it’s creating chaos for advertisers. In order to help advertisers sort through that information, Yahoo! can advertisers better insights, better data, and better targeting. “This means less wasted impressions and a better ability to reach your audience,” Carol said.

To read on, visit the Yahoo! Advertising blog.

Tags: internet marketing, search engine, SEO, Yahoo!

Yahoo! at San Francisco’s 4A conference

Did you ever see the 1950 classic “All About Eve?” In it, Bette Davis plies the classic line, “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!”

Well Sunday, Feb. 28 begins the 4A Conference at the Union Square Hilton in San Francisco. At this fab confab, advertising’s best will appear and show off their newest and most fabulous wares. It promises to be a bumpy but fantastic conference, one full of surprises.

As the 4A the website says, it’s a chance for advertisers and agencies to “Collaborate with and ask questions of one another. Listen to leaders who have first-hand experience in transforming their own businesses to meet the emerging needs of a new era. Be a part of the bigger picture, the solutions to the time-consuming age-old questions of monetization and evolution.” That sounds pretty good. We can’t wait.

Here’s the up-shot on the Yahoo! down-low:

Sunday, Feb. 28

• 6:00 to 7 P.M: Opening Night Reception Sponsored by Yahoo! — Cityscape Room, Hilton

Monday, March 1

• 10 A.M: Carol Bartz, Transforming Yahoo! — Continental Ballroom, 2nd Floor
  Noon to 7 P.M: Yahoo! Transformation Lounge — Free custom lattes and live storyboard artist, lobby level
• 5:30 to 7 P.M: Cocktails in 4A’s Transformation Lounge (which includes a special Yahoo! space)
  7 P.M to 10 P.M: Dinner in Continental Ballroom sponsored by Microsoft

Tuesday, March 2

• 8 A.M. to 6 P.M Yahoo! Transformation Lounge Open — Free Custom lattes and live storyboard artist

Can’t be there? No problem. We will be, live blogging the events, tweeting and posting to the Yahoo! Advertising Facebook page.

—The Team

Tags: internet marketing, search engine, SEO, Yahoo!