The process usually starts with researching and compiling extensive, wide-ranging keyword lists. Next, comes building and launching campaigns with those keywords. The goal of this phase is to get a sense of which keywords have potential. The final, and ongoing phase is optimizing the campaign, which includes: trimming the unprofitable keywords, expanding the profitable ones, adjusting ad-copy and keyword bids until you find a profitable combination.

Once you’ve found your profitable keywords you need to guard them like a hawk, because they don’t come easy.

To build a successful PPC campaign, you need to have a “marathon” mindset, instead of a “sprint” mindset.  It is an ongoing loop of: analyze-adapt-get results-analyze-adapt-get results. This process is certainly much easier if you have the right tools in your tool kit. At iSpionage we have designed a unique tool that helps you with this process. Our tool kit contains:

1. Keyword & Domain Research
2. Keyword Monitoring
3. PPC Campaign Builder

1: Keyword & Domain Research Module

Using iSpionage Keyword & Domain Research, you can leverage your top competitors’ keyword research and campaign optimization efforts.

With just one click, you can learn which keywords your competitors use.  With that same click, you will receive access to all of your competitors’ keywords, as well as estimates of the   keyword search traffic, ads, ad positioning, and CPC data.

Below is a screen shot of what you get when you enter the domain “Godaddy.com” in the search bar.

With the advertiser summary, you will get:

• An estimate of their PPC budget
• # of clicks per month
• Google & Yahoo PPC keywords
• Working ad-copy associated with each keyword

Here is a screen shot of the advertiser’s ad copy history with first seen and last seen dates.  This information lets you see which ad copy was effective for which keyword.

If you are interested in generating more keywords for your campaign, you can just type in a keyword and iSpionage will give you the top competitors in both Google and Yahoo.

Additionally, you will also get a list of strongly related keywords that you can further expand upon.

Screen shot of keyword results: web hosting

The nice thing about iSponage’s keyword research tool, is that you have access to data from Google as well as Yahoo.

To have an optimal PPC campaign, you should understand the competitive environment. This tool can be used to analyze competitors’ keyword-ad copy-landing page strategy, so you can out-strategize the competition.

2: Keyword Monitor

Whether you are entering a new market, or you want to monitor certain keyword groups like your profitable keywords, you will find the Keyword Monitor from iSponage to be your best friend.

With Keyword Monitor you will learn:

• Who are your top competitors are in each keyword group.

• The impression share that goes to your website, and your competitors’ websites. Which you can use to measure your ad coverage compared to the other advertisers.
  

• Competitors’ ad copy tests and results.

You can also set email alerts so that you are notified when your competitors change ad copy, add more keywords, or when a new competitor arrives on the scene.

Keyword Monitor allows you to zoom into other advertisers’ PPC campaigns, allowing you to analyze: how they structure their ad groups, ad copy history, ad positioning, landing pages, etc.

With this intelligence you put your business into position to grab the market from your competitors.

3: PPC Campaign Builder

The PPC campaign builder helps the user create a PPC campaign, starting by generating keywords, continuing to creating keyword groups and writing ad-copies, and ultimately finishing with launching campaigns onto Google, Yahoo, and Bing in a quick and effective fashion.

Start by typing in your base keyword and let the tool generate the list of related keywords. Your next step will be to select those keywords you want to focus on (like in the previous steps, average search volume and advertisers’ competition will help you to choose).

Clean Up Keyword Lists

You can now go to the “Keyword Clean Up” tab to sort and clean up the list:

• Sort the list & Remove duplicates
• Keep / Remove lines containing any specified word
• Remove the specified characters (e.g. @$#/%^&*~_=+)

Group the Keywords

Start by giving a name to your campaign for further reference. Then, provide the grouping criteria:

• Create a group by base word (Keep lines containing this word); AND / OR
• Create a group by excluding some words from the list AND / OR
• Create a group based on the number of words in a phrase (Keep lines with the number of keywords).

Don’t forget to give each group a name (I suggest giving each a descriptive name based on the grouping criteria: e.g. “3-word”, “no-stop words”, etc):

Build PPC Campaign

When you are done grouping your keywords, you can go to the “Campaign Builder” tab to create your PPC campaign:

First, set up ad group pricing:

Then, go to the “Ad Setup,” where you will write and create your ad details (each ad headline, text and destination URL). You can also populate the same ads to your other ad groups and make minor edits to differentiate them. These are all nice features and designed to help the user save time when creating PPC campaigns.

Once you are done, generate the output and you can upload it to Google, Yahoo or Bing directly.

This module streamlines all aspects of your PPC campaign building process, from keyword research, grouping and ad copy writing for all 3 search engines. What used to take hours, or even days, now can be done in just a few minutes.

iSpionage is a useful tool for search marketers looking to get competitive intelligence data to improve or optimize their campaigns. It will also shorten the time it takes to create campaigns, especially for keyword research and launching campaigns in the three major search engines.

By using it you, can spend more time developing a better PPC strategy that will save money and time, and increase ROI of your PPC campaigns. Anyone who is serious about PPC advertising needs to check out this tool.

Click here to learn more about iSpionage Keyword Research tool

BEFORE

AFTER

We hope you love it as much as we do. After all, this redesign is for you, our readers. So in addition to the spiffy new look (and chiseled biceps), you will find the following new features to make browsing and interacting with our blog much easier:

1. Get the best of both worlds, all in one place! The Twitter feed will enable you to stay connected with @ppchero special news and announcements that may not appear on the blog.
2. Finding our best content just got easier with a dedicated section for PPC Hero’s Most Popular blog posts.
3. Can’t get enough of PPC Hero? The new Connect section in the footer provides an easy, one-stop portal so you can connect with the team via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other cool stuff.
4. Looking for help on a specific topic? Quickly find the most relevant content via the new Categories page.
5. Spread the PPC Hero love! Easily share favorite blog content with your social network via the social media bar.

Of course we hope that you enjoy the new look and features. However, with every redesign there are some growing pains. Please reach out to our team if you have any technical issues with our new site!

Google has made it easy to implement search campaigns on mobile phones, but many search marketers are still hesitating to take the leap into this new space. Search Engine Watch’s Parks Blackwell encourages search marketers to leverage low CPC’s and test mobile search campaigns.

This post from SEO Scoop gives some great suggestions on how to use your PPC data to gain insight into your SEO strategy. By digging int the data, you can find the best keywords to go after, and if you are showing ads on the content network, you can use that data to help build your link building strategies.

Maintaining a great client relationship takes skill. SEMGeek thinks the first meeting “discovery phase” is the most important. It certainly helps to make a good impression when first meeting with a client and set the tone for the rest of the working relationship. In their report, they have some great tips for starting things our right.

Microsoft adCenter Desktop Tool
As an avid user of the Adwords Editor, I was delighted when Microsoft launched their adCenter desktop tool. Sure, I knew it wouldn’t be as robust or user friendly, but at least it was something! Over the past year I’ve stumbled upon a few things that I hope will help streamline the use of the desktop tool, and make it a little more effective for editing and optimizing your campaigns.

When using the desktop tool, there are a few things that I think are important to keep in mind:

• Your entire account will be downloaded when exporting. Unlike the Editor, you are not able to choose specific campaigns, ad groups, ads, or views to download. You get the whole enchilada every time. However, when uploading, it is not necessary to have every row of your account in your spreadsheet, nor do you have to have every column accounted for. You do however, need to have enough information included so the level you are editing can be identified. For example, if you are editing your keyword status and bids, you need to include the campaign and ad group columns along with the keyword columns that contain your changes. When in doubt, more information is better.
• Your CSV import file can’t be more than 10,000 rows. Though a rep gave me this threshold, I haven’t seen an official limit documented. I have, however, had more success uploading when I kept my file between 5,000-8,000 rows. I also prefer to break up my account by campaigns, and upload them separately when possible, but that’s just a personal preference.
• You can edit multiple rows at once. Like the editor, you can select multiple selections at once within the tool. This is helpful, because you can quickly change things like the CPC, status, or match type for multiple rows in one step (assuming you want them all to the same).
• There are multiple account views. When viewing the various sections of your account, you have multiple choices about the data you are looking at. You can see the entire account, pending changes, errors, etc. However, as you change between the levels of your account (campaign, ad group, ads, keywords) the view doesn’t hold. This isn’t a big deal, but it’s something to keep in mind so you ensure that you are always looking at an accurate view.
• Your CSV Import file layout matters. When importing, I’ve found that I have fewer errors when I start with an export file instead of the template you can get online. As I mentioned above, you do not have to have all of the columns or rows from the export file, but you do need to make sure that headers you are using are in the same order, and are called the same thing in order for your import to be successful.

In addition to editing your campaigns offline, the desktop tool can help you with your keyword research, and you can automatically add the relevant results to your ad groups, or add them as campaign or ad group negatives. There are four tools that you can use, but it’s important to keep in mind that the data in these tools is based on US Traffic Only, and the only metric you will see is last month’s impressions.

1. Similar keywords: enter a word or phrase, and it will come up with (you guessed it!) similar keywords.
2. Extracted keywords: enter a website, and it will give you a list of keywords that are the most prominent and/or relevant from that site. This tool can be very helpful for competitive reviews.
3. Frequent keywords: this tool gives you keywords that have a lot of impressions, but they are EXTREMELY broad (think Google and Yahoo), so they probably won’t be very relevant to your business.
4. Category Keywords: This tool gives you keywords that generate impressions within categories created by MSN. For example, in the Animals category, the term “dogs” was returned. Again, the results from this tool are more than likely too broad to be of any real use to you.

Microsoft Advertising Intelligence
We all understand that quality keyword research is what helps not only get our campaigns off to a great start, but that it is vital for their ongoing success as search evolves. I’ve been able to use this Excel plug-in to create new keyword lists, have more insight into the Bing content network, and identify search trends. It’s very easy to use, and it’s incredibly fast considering the amount of information that is returned. As with the desktop tool, there are a few things that I’ve found while using the tool that you might want to keep in mind:

• Make sure that Excel 2007 is installed on your computer.
• The data that is returned comes from Live.com index and adCenter. It’s important to keep in mind that Bing accounts for less than 10% of the traffic share right now, so you can’t assume the data is applicable to your Google or Yahoo! accounts. Instead, use the information as a guideline to understand the relative search volume, relevance, and pricing for one keyword over another, and combine it with other research efforts.
• If you’re all of a sudden unable to access the toolbar after using it for a while, change the time on your computer/server. We found that by changing the time by about five minutes we were able to once again verify our account, and regain access.
• Once the plug-in is installed you can access the three tool sections through your Excel toolbar.

The Keyword Research section gives you access to a variety of tools that allow you to perform the following tasks:

• Identify keyword categories to help your campaigns and ad groups stay organized.
• Recognize trends by spotting traffic spikes. This tool can help you analyze seasonal trends, and help you prepare for upcoming shifts in traffic.
• Find high volume keywords across different business verticals to help with competitive research.
• Gather demographic and location information on searchers.
• Forecast keyword volume for the month to help you manage your spend.
• Analyze content network statistics so you can identify high volume keywords and potential relevant domains.

The Pricing section contains tools that help you:

• Access pricing estimates for the search and content networks.
• Create benchmarks based on key performance indicators (KPIs) for various verticals that have been pre-determined within the tool.

The Content section, while currently only for the US, gives you tools to:

• Identify most frequently seen keywords within various verticals.
• Analyze pricing estimates by vertical for both the search and content networks.
• Gather content network pricing and impression estimates.

Effectively Using adCenter PPC Tools
Overall I think Microsoft has come a long way in helping advertisers better manage their campaigns, and I look forward to seeing how the merger will further enhance these tools. At the end of the day it is our responsibility as advertisers to understand what our data represents, and know how to use it to effectively grow and optimize our campaigns. No matter what tools you use to streamline your account changes, or conduct keyword research, take a few extra minutes to try and understand what you are looking at, and what, if any, shortcomings the data might have. Combining data from multiple reliable sources will always help ensure that you are making the best decision possible.

Doing this can really help narrow down your keyword list and prevent unqualified traffic from seeing your ad and not clicking – which prevents your impressions from skyrocketing and therefore lowering your click-through rate. But negatives also can prevent people from clicking on your ads, costing you money and lowering your conversion rates.

However, if you’re only relying on the search query reports you’re really only being reactive in preventing your ad from being shown and clicked on by irrelevant traffic.

Before you even start a PPC account, you should be running basic keyword research reports to find potential keywords that could cause irrelevant traffic from seeing your ads and/or clicking on them before it even happens.  This is a more proactive approach in keeping unqualified traffic out and therefore increasing click-through rates and Quality Scores. For example, you could be doing PPC keyword research on ‘vacation in Paris’ but find keywords that have search volume for, ‘weddings in paris’, or ‘paris movies’. At this point you would want to add in ‘weddings’ and ‘movies’ to you negative keyword list to weed out that irrelevant/unqualified traffic.

You can run keyword research reports in Google, Yahoo, MSN and several other free keyword tools to find potential negatives.

Every PPC firm should have an on-going list of potential generic negatives that could be used across all of their accounts. Some of these terms can include:

Free

Sex

Comparison

Reviews

Diagram

Pictures

Career

Job/Jobs

Bargain

Discount

Cheap

And much, much more.  **Note that some of these generic keywords may be relevant to your business.

Really, the search query reports are for finding negatives that you miss from your initial keyword research. Get in the mind of searchers and find those negatives before they find you!

The problem with most multilingual pay-per-click campaigns is laziness. Many advertisers will launch international campaigns without consideration for accurate translations and culturally relevant messaging. Thankfully this problem is easy to overcome with a little extra consideration and planning. So before you launch a multilingual pay per click campaign, take to time to focus on the following best practices:

1. Translations. Translations. Translations. The success or failure of a multilingual pay-per-click campaign lies in the crux of translations. The quality of translation is the most critical component, and thus should receive the most attention and consideration. Many advertisers are guilty (often unknowingly) of translating ad copy in a literal sense without consideration for localization. When this happens, ad and landing page copy is often confusing to a native speaker, decreasing the effectiveness of your campaign. Not to mention, literal translations stick out like a sore thumb, native speakers can immediately pick up on the lack of consideration for their language, and will immediately dismiss your message.Don’t fall victim to this common mistake. Don’t use a simple online tool. You need a human! Spend time researching a quality translation service at the onset. A quality translation service will read the content in English, then rewrite the content to it conveys the same message and tone in your language of choice. Once you receive translated content, run it by a native speaker to ensure the job was done right.
2. Leverage Existing Campaign Structure. Campaign structure is very important with a multilingual pay-per-click initiative. Regardless of the quantity of languages targeted, campaigns and ad groups should be separated based on language. You can only set language and geographic targeting at the campaign level in Google, so your language breakdown must be at this level.Leverage your well-organized campaign structure from your English-targeted campaigns. To build a campaign in another language, duplicate the structure (but not the keywords) of your English campaigns. Next, modify the keywords (see multilingual keyword research below), ad text and landing pages accordingly.
3. Pay Attention to Your Campaign Settings. According to the AdWords help section, “the AdWords system looks at a user’s Google interface language setting to see if it matches one of the languages that your campaign targets.” If your campaign only targets “Spanish” for the campaign settings, then the ads will only serve to users who have designated “Spanish” in their Google account. For example, a user is searching on Google.com and has their personal account settings set to “Spanish,” then they will see ads from Spanish-targeted campaigns. Similarly, if someone is searching on Google.fr the language default is French, etc. If you are targeting users in a different country that speak one common language, then set your AdWords campaign to target that language.However, depending on your campaign objectives, this type of language targeting may narrow your search too much. Particularly when you are targeting a bilingual audience. In this case, you can expand your campaign targeting by changing your campaign settings to target more than one language.
4. Conduct Multilingual Keyword Research. Don’t just translate your keywords! In most cases, keywords or phrases can have multiple meanings when translated in another language. If you use a direct translation, then your keywords or phrases may not be relevant to your product. Conduct multilingual keyword research to best target keywords in the targeted language. Get started on your keyword list with the following:
   • Search Query Report. Run a search query report to identify existing foreign language keywords that are serving your ads.
   • Competitive Research. Refer to competitor ads and landing pages to identify keywords or phrases that are relevant to your campaign. Note, be aware you’re your competitors translations may not be accurate. Always run these keywords or phrases by a translation service or a native speaker prior to launch.
   • Translate Existing Keywords. Start with the keywords that you are targeting in English. Hire a strong translation service to identify the most common translation for that keyword or phrase—be careful of taking direct translations!
   • Ask a Native Speaker. Once you have completed your keyword research, run your list by a native speaker. This simple step will identify any red flags in the translations. It can also spark new keyword-targeting opportunities.

   If you plan to target a campaign in Spanish, you need to target keywords in Spanish. While some advertisers target Spanish speakers with English keywords and ad text, it is strongly recommended to cater your messaging to the native language. First, keywords in other languages are much less expensive, so you will see lower cost-per-clicks within these campaigns. Secondly, your campaign will be much more relevant to your target audience if you speak their language. Take the time to translate your entire language-targeted campaigns, this simple step may give you a leg up over your competition.

5. Use Language-Specific Ad Text and Landing Pages. Translated ad copy and landing pages are mutually exclusive. You cannot have one without the other. The landing page needs to play off of the cultural promise from the ad text. So, if your ad text is in Spanish, then your landing page needs to be in Spanish. To maximize relevance and effectiveness of your campaign, both ad text and landing pages need to be translated to the targeted language.As with keywords, both the ad text and landing pages should not be a direct translation of the English copy. I apologize if I am starting to sound like a broken record, but work with a strong translation company to translate your landing page and ads from English to your targeted language. A strong translation service will make adjustments to cater to local dialects and cultures. Landing page localization does not just stop at translations— incorporating culturally relevant images, design and color schemes also should be considered to improve relevancy.

Have your launched a multilingual campaign? Please share your experience and suggestions!

Last week we talked about the Google content network and automatic placements. I completely ignored the fact that managed placements exist because they didn’t fit in with my description of the ways in which targeting automatic placements is just like riding a flaming motorcycle, but I’m fixing that this week with an even more convoluted metaphor for the content network.

So play along with me for a minute. You are a lion! There are lots and lots of cute little bunnies hopping around your savanna. Whenever you come across one, you can probably reach your paw out and swipe it without much investment. But you have to catch so many to eat well. You might have to spend your whole day munching on rabbits just to feel well-fed. It’s one of nature’s balances: low risk, low reward. Automatic content placements: they are the rabbits of the search marketing world.

But what if you look up and see: a wildebeest? Now that’s 600 pounds of respectable animal. Those things are scary. They can hurt you, and it’s an enormous energy expenditure to try to catch one. If you’re unsuccessful, it’s has the potential to be a huge loss for you. But if you succeed: Wow! 600 pounds of meat! Your whole family can eat for a week. Managed content placements: they’re our wildebeests.

When you launch a content campaign and ad groups based on keyword themes, it’s like waking up in the morning surrounded by delicious bunnies. Google automatically matches your ads to sites they think are contextually relevant, and you’re supposed to start converting! But Google knows a few things. There are millions of sites in their content network. Some of them convert well, some of them don’t. They try to balance this out for advertisers and improve our ROI with a system called smart pricing, which basically boils down to: on sites Google thinks will have lower conversion rates, you pay less for your clicks. You don’t have visibility regarding what sites you’re getting smart pricing on, but overall, it can help lower your cost per lead for your automatic placements. For advertisers with a lot of traffic on the content network, this can be a great advantage because if you have a lot of automatic placements, you will sometimes convert on the very low-cost smart priced sites. With aggressive elimination of non-converting, high-spend sites, this can help generate a lot of conversions at a reasonable cost; but as I said last week, it can be a time-intensive process to turn all of those one-off conversions into a viable long-term lead generation strategy.

So you might think: can’t I just find a couple of wildebeests and stop messing around with all of these little guys? Wouldn’t that be nice, to just target a few high-conversion sites with managed placements and simplify your life? It’s possible…you might stumble upon a site and know this is just the audience that will convert for your ads. Or it might be hiding in there with the rabbits, the page Google automatically matched you to that has a CPL 1/3 of your goal and has converted 52 times this month. It’s tempting to want to grab these up, add them to our managed placements or create a site-targeted ad group for them, and let the leads roll in.  Which is a great strategy, except for that it doesn’t always work.

Do you know why? Well, because targeting a placement is just like telling Google: this is high value for me. You’re not going to be getting any kind of discount on your advertising for that site. If the conversion rates on a site are really so high that you can afford to pay more per click, then by all means, try to add a managed placement for that site or page. But be sure to increase your bid- you’re probably not going to get away with using the same bids as you use for your automatic placements on your managed placements. You’ve declared the value of that site, and you will have to take on additional risk to obtain that value. It might not work: if your bid isn’t high enough, your ads won’t show often, and traffic on the site will decrease enough that you’ll lose leads rather than gain them as compared to the site’s performance as an automatic placement. Also, if conversion rates on the site aren’t high enough to counteract your increased bid, it’s possible your CPL could go up once a placement is managed as opposed to automatically matched.

Like the lion’s decision about when it’s wise to chase down a wildebeest, you can’t just be adding managed placements without carefully considering your potential for success and expect to win every time. If you’re getting a high number of low CPL conversions on a low conversion rate site because your clicks are high but your CPC is very low…probably not a great candidate for managed placement. A high conversion rate, coupled with a reasonably low cost per click and low potential competition on the managed placement you’re considering (you can go to the page and see who’s competing for that space) are probably the best indicators of potential success. But as always, there are no guarantees in life. You need to follow the data carefully, modify your bids to gain more traffic or lower CPL as necessary, and understand when to give up the chase. Sometimes managed placements you would really like to make work don’t. Delete them, eat some more bunnies, and keep an eye out for the next big one.

Get your Google click to call deal while you can! Search Engine Watch has a useful post this week on Mobile PPCall and Click to Call Pricing. Not only does the article explain the significance of the click to call feature but it also includes a hint from Google to take advantage of the current pricing.

What you put on your landing page is key to your PPC success. Search Engine Land recommends one more way to boost your conversions through cross-selling. Although you may not be an ecommerce company, the general concept and tips can be applied to any PPC program.

Now that the Yahoo! and Bing partnership is official, and it will mean big changes for PPC advertisers. Though we will all have time to prepare, we need to start preparing our strategy adjustments sooner rather than later, and this Clix post gives us a few ideas about what changes we will be adapting to.

Setting up campaigns for regional targeting is a great way to boost relevant traffic to your site. The question, as Search Engine Land’s Debra Northart points out, is just how narrow should your geo-targeting be? This post gives you some ideas on what to consider when you’re planning out how to geo-target.

In most cases, the way to most effectively reach a local audience is to combine geo-targeted PPC campaigns with accurate local listings. No matter what the user’s intent, your presence in both the ad space and local listings will help convey that you are a reliable resource.

Geo-Targeting

So let’s start with the three options you have for setting up your PPC campaigns. The first is to create a geo-targeted campaign, which allows your ads to only show in specified locations. The best part is that you have a wide array of areas that you can choose from, including countries, cities, and even a certain radius around your location. The second option is to add geo-qualified keywords to your campaigns, which are keywords that include the location in them, but any searcher, in any location, can see them. The third option would be to place geo-qualified keywords in your geo-targeted campaign, but the strategy you choose will be dependent on your target audience, and what makes the most sense in how to reach them.

Once you have identified the best way to reach your target audience, and you’ve set up your geo-targeted campaigns, you can move on to verifying your local listing information.

Setting Up Your Local Listings

Google, Yahoo!, and Bing all have a local listing center where you can set up and claim your business. However, I prefer to use GetListed.org, because you can set up and manage all three from one interface. It’s also a great way to keep tabs on the reviews your site has received, and keep a to-do list of the items that will help your local listings rank better.

Upon entering your company’s name and zip code, you’ll be taken to the snapshot page where you can see how many, if any, of your listings have been claimed in the engines.

From this page, you can click the links to claim your listing, and you are taken through a simple two to three step process. During these steps you will be able to enter valuable information for your customers like store hours, accepted forms of payment, and a description of your products or services. Once you are finished, you will have a direct line to each of the local interfaces where you can see that your listings have been verified, and you can make any necessary changes as time goes on.

Advanced Location Settings In Google

In addition to preventing your listing from being hijacked, claiming your listing can also benefit your PPC campaigns in Google. Under campaign settings, you now have the option to show relevant addresses with your ads to searchers that are in your targeted area. When you think about it, what better way is there to stand out to your potential customers than to have a relevant geo-targeted ad along with an accurate address?

In order to turn this feature on, after your listing has been claimed in Google, click on the campaign you want to edit, and go to the settings tab. Under Locations, Languages, and Demographics click on the link that will allow you to show relevant addresses with your ads (advanced). From here you will see your location extension options.

Though it is possible to enter an address that has not been verified, the benefits of claiming your listing far outweigh the effort to do so, so I would not recommend skipping that step.

Positioning Your Business For Success

Marketers today consider local search to be the fastest growing online division. And according to Michael Boland, program director, Mobile Local Media (MLM), The Kelsey Group, “As mobile data consumption rises, we expect local marketing to be a big winner. There is a strong correlation between local search and the mobile use case, which will cause a good portion of the ongoing mobile application boom to focus on local.”

Positioning yourself with geo-targeted PPC campaigns and tying them to your claimed local listings will help you get ahead of your competition, and establish a local presence where qualified consumers are. Doing the work today will help ensure that you are ready to ride the wave of local and mobile search, and your money will be spent on the most qualified traffic.

If you are like most pay-per-click managers, your YSM account is probably a cloned export of your Google AdWords account (excluding the content network campaigns of course). Assuming your AdWords account has a strong structure, duplication across search engines is still a good practice. However, with Yahoo’s new features, can take your campaigns to the next level. It is time to revisit your Yahoo campaign structure to get the most out of the network distribution features.

How the Search Partner Network Works
First things first, Yahoo! Search Partners and Content Match are two completely different animals and it is important that you don’t confuse the two. Yahoo’s content match displays ads based on specific web page content, geographic location and/or user profile. As cautioned in the past, the content match can spend a lot of money quickly. If you are running a lead-based campaign, watch your ROI very closely.

The Yahoo! Search Partners is a network of larger websites that have partnered with Yahoo, including Ebay.com, MSNBC, and USA Today.com. If you enable Search Partners with your pay-per-click account, then your ads will appear on these websites.

How to Structure Your Campaigns

1. Maintain Focused Campaigns/Ad Groups. Factors used to determine your account quality index in Yahoo have not changed.  It is still important to structure your campaigns and ad groups into highly focused content silos. This will enable you to write highly targeted ad text and drive traffic to highly relevant landing pages. In turn, your click-through rates will increase and your quality index will be stronger. If your Yahoo pay-per-click account is a mess, I strongly recommend a restructure before moving on to #2.
2. Separate Yahoo! Search and Search Partners. Yahoo now allows you to control your keyword bids on their search partner network. Performance varies greatly across Yahoo Search and Search Partners. By separating the distribution networks into different campaigns, you will have greater control over bids, allowing you to better maximize ROI.

   To target each network in a separate campaign, simply duplicate your campaigns in the Yahoo interface and set one to target Yahoo! Search and the other to Search Partners. Check out my post from last week to find Yahoo’s network distribution campaign settings.  To help with account management, I strongly recommending modifying the campaign names to include a network targeting qualifier (i.e. Example Campaign – Search and Example Campaign – Partners).

3. Duplicate Your Campaigns. Thankfully Yahoo now makes it easy for pay-per-click managers to separate Search and Search Partners. Using the “Import Campaigns” function, you can now easily import duplicate campaigns into Yahoo. Just follow these instructions.

Step 1: Export the campaign you choose to duplicate from the Yahoo campaigns tab. Save to your desktop.
Step 2: Go to the “Import” section within your Yahoo account
Step 3: Select your file to upload.
Step 4: From the Duplicate Campaigns dropdown menu, select Create a new campaign. This will create duplicate of the campaign, but it will change the name to Example Campaign (copy001). Since there is a current campaign running, the default will set the new campaign to pause.
Step 5: Change your network distribution settings for the existing and duplicated campaign.
Step 6: Add “Search” or “Partner” qualifiers to the campaign names.
Step 7: Activate the duplicated campaign.

How to Optimize Your Campaigns
Yahoo launched more advanced features to provide more transparency and better management of Search Partner network performance. Use the following features to optimize your newly structured search partner campaigns:

1. Distribution Quality Report – Use this report to determine your account performance within the entire network, search only, or search partners. This report is very useful in determining whither or not to continue running on the search partner network.
2. Ad Delivery Report – This report shows specific domains performance (including corresponding conversion metrics) for sites your ads run on within the Yahoo Search Partners. Use this report to identify sites that do not translate into conversions. Since new sites can appear every day, I recommend checking this report once a week to stay on top of high cost, low-converting sites.
3. Blocked Domains – This feature can by found within your account “Administration” tab. Add low-performing sites identified within the Ad Delivery Report to your campaign exclusions. Yahoo allows up to 500 blocked domains, so use ‘em if you got ‘em!

What is your experience with Yahoo’s network distribution features? Post your thoughts, learnings and/or experiences in the comments below.