Yahoo! Search Marketing Blocked Domains Help

Yahoo Search Marketing recently increased the max number of blocked domains from 250 to 500 per account. What does that tell you? Hmmm...

Yes, they still have a sausage problem. They'd be better off cleaning up their syndication network themselves, rather than placing the burden on advertisers to block low quality traffic on their own. Consider this statement from Yahoo in the comments in response to questions about what report(s) to run in the Yahoo Search Marketing system to find the domains where an advertiser's ads are displayed:

Though we currently don’t have a report that specifically indentifies which of our partners the click came from, we suggest you look into your weblogs for such information especially when using tracking urls.

IOW, you're on your own. Yahoo! Well, if Yahoo won't help you, I will. You can use my firm's free, open source script to track clicks from Yahoo ads. It's a quick way to see the domains where the clicks originate:



Tags: yahoo search marketing, blocked domains

The Big G Financial Bailout Plan

While old economy companies are pouring into Washington, hat in hand, seeking a financial bailout from the government, one new economy company has its own financial bailout plan. Yes, I'm talking about Google.  The Big G has its hand extended to its vast advertising base.  These are the steps in the Google bailout plan:

1. Entice advertisers to bid higher (with the introduction of first page bid estimates displayed to advertisers):
   
   
2. Place more ads in prime search real estate (bundled with ad quality improvements).
   
3. Put more ads in more places (such as Google Finance which is likely seeing traffic surges during this economic crisis).
   
4. Suggest advertisers buy more keywords (and at even higher bids than first page estimates).

What's clever here is that Google is not raising prices.  Instead, Google is attempting to convince advertisers to raise prices themselves.  Much of these potential price increases are being sold as ad quality improvements.  This is, indeed, a cleverly orchestrated financial bailout plan.  Advertisers need to be careful as these changes are implemented.  Some, but not all, will benefit advertisers.  The new transparency into bids, however, is clearly designed to boost Google's revenue.  That revenue will come straight from advertisers' pockets.

Tags: financial, bailout, plan, google

Client Wins Salesforce Appy Award for Marketing Excellence

I enjoy seeing my clients succeed.  When they are recognized for that success, it's even more rewarding.  TimeTrade, a client who provides appointment scheduling software, recently won the 2008 Salesforce Appy Award for Marketing Excellence:

The award recognizes the salesforce.com customer who has demonstrated excellence with Salesforce CRM Marketing. The customer has improved lead quality and conversions, has high campaign ROI and campaign effectiveness, and understands the importance of integrated sales and marketing. TimeTrade Systems won the award for their very effective use of Salesforce for Google AdWords.

Here's a screenshot I grabbed from the Dreamforce 2008 webcast:



Congratulations, Dave!

Top Contributor in New Google AdWords Help Forum

Google has created new software to power their help forums, including AdWords Help:

The AdWordsPro team and AdWords Help Owner are the only Google employees to post here. They can be identified by their usernames and the 'Google Employee' label beneath those usernames. Top Contributors are AdWords forum members who consistently provide outstanding support to the forum community.

Based on my contributions in the old AdWords Help groups (I posted as Rich@Apogee), they've granted me the Top Contributor designation. Thanks, Google! I'll be posting as rball in the new group:



Check out the new AdWords Help for, well, AdWords help.