The Bing and Yahoo Search Alliance Update

August 17, 2010 0 Comments

We try to cover the stories as they happen as the Search Alliance between Bing and Yahoo comes together. Today, I received an email update from Bing and Yahoo stating that this is the week and Bing will finally start powering all of Yahoo’s English based organic searches in the United States and Canada. While they have been doing some beta testing here and there, this is the launch week to fully take over these searches. I know many that are eager to see if this search alliance will do anything for Bing’s growth toward Google, so this milestone is an important one. Here is the email from the Search Alliance describing their newest milestone.

This is an exciting week for Bing as we reach another major milestone in the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. This week, Bing will begin powering organic search results on Yahoo! Search for the English language in the United States and Canada.

After this organic transition is complete, Bing will power 5.2 billion monthly searches, which is 31.6 percent of the search market share in the United States and 8.6 percent share in Canada.¹ You can take advantage of this traffic by using search engine optimization (SEO) to complement your search campaigns and boost the visibility of your business. Bing webmaster tools can help you troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your site, submit sitemaps, and view statistics about your sites—all to improve your visibility on Bing. Get started by visiting the Bing Toolbox or watching our video.

Advertise on Yahoo! Search and Bing through adCenter
If you currently advertise on Yahoo! Search, you will soon have the option to use a transition tool in Yahoo! Search Marketing that will walk you through the steps to transition your Yahoo! Search campaigns into Microsoft Advertising adCenter. This transition tool is currently in testing with a select group of advertisers. We plan to make it available to all Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers in the coming weeks, giving you the ability to advertise on Yahoo! Search and Bing with one adCenter ad buy.

To help you prepare for a successful transition, please continue to work with your existing support contacts and visit the Microsoft Transition Center for the latest information about the new marketplace. Remember, our primary goal is to provide you with a quality transition experience in 2010, while protecting the holiday season. However, if we conclude that it would improve the overall experience, we may choose to defer the transition to 2011.

We appreciate your business and look forward to bringing you the benefits of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance.

Sincerely,

Your partners in the search alliance, Yahoo! and Microsoft

A Common Paid Search Mistake

August 12, 2010 1 Comment

A question that I am frequently asked is how someone can maximize their paid search account. It doesn’t matter if they are advertising on Google, Yahoo (now using Bing’s results), or Bing. While there are many ways for someone to get the best results out of pay per click advertising, there is one common mistake that I find in almost every account I look at. The enemy of every online marketer: High Cost Keywords. You would be surprised how many people start a new campaign or ad group without looking over the keywords to see how much they cost and how much traffic they may bring. This mistake is not just made with PPC novices, but also people and companies that have been doing it for a long time.

High cost keywords can destroy a well developed campaign in a matter of hours, fully depleting the daily spend and leaving your campaign paralyzed until the next day comes around. I tell everyone that I consult for to make sure and take a few extra steps to ensure that there are no high cost keywords hiding in their keyword builds. It is a simple thing to fix, but not many actually do it. There are many keyword estimation tools out there that can help you decide which keywords are right for you, but one of my favorite and easiest to use it the Google Keyword Estimator. This tool is free to use and can estimate cost and clicks for up to 5000 keywords per batch. Google has introduced a new beta for this tool, but I prefer to use the old legacy platform. After running a simple search, you can find out if the keywords that you want to use will be searched on and how much they will cost. Simple, effective, and will save you a lot of money.

I understand that most that use PPC advertising want to get visitors and conversions, but just because you put a high cost keyword in, doesn’t mean you will get what you want. In most cases, high cost keywords will bring you traffic, but rarely bring the conversions. This is a big no-no in paid search advertising. You have to justify your ad spend with conversions, so unless you have thousands to spend and are just looking for visitors, leave the high cost keywords out. How much do you think the word apple will cost you in a day? Take a look at a few of the top apple terms…..

I did this search on the basis of just $0.50 per click and no budget to show the potential of what these type of keywords would bring. Does your advertising budget have this much per day? You might ask why anyone would put these terms in their search ad groups, but I have seen companies that just sell aftermarket ipod, iphone, and ipad accessories have these terms in their account. They never could understand why they were wasting so much money and never getting any conversions. The data speaks for itself I believe. Most people that search for these broad terms are notorious for not purchasing. They are in the research stage of the buying cycle. People that search for terms that usually contain 3-5 terms have a better chance of purchasing than broad searchers do. If you don’t sell these items, then you never need to be bidding on them. You will never win and you will end up broke. Do yourself and your company a favor and take an extra 5 minutes to put all your keywords through a traffic estimator and strip out all the high cost keywords. You will be happy that you did.

Back-to-School Search Marketing Webinar

August 4, 2010 0 Comments

Is your online business ready for the back-to-school rush? If not, you better get it in gear and quickly. Back-to-school spending is the second highest for online shopping all year only to be bested by the fourth quarter holiday rush. If you have products or services that relates to back-to-school then you should have all of your marketing efforts in full swing. Yahoo if hosting a free webinar that goes into the best practices for back-to-school content and search campaigns. They wil also provide great search trends that occurred during the 2009 rush.

If you are interested in learning how to get your search and content campaigns running right, then join Yahoo on Thursday, August 5th at 11:00 am Pacific Standard time. This webinar will probably run around an hour with questions. Sign up for free and make sure you are ready for the back-to-school rush.

News Corp Not Keeping Up with Technology

November 11, 2009 0 Comments

News Corp’s CEO Rupert Murdoch sat down with Sky News the other day to talk about the News business and the internet. You can find the video below, but we are going to give you the jist of it because frankly it made us laugh. News corp owns the likes of the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and many other news outlets for those of you who were not aware. There is a chance that these sites will no longer be able to be found on Google or other search engines for that matter.

In the interview, Murdoch said that he was not happy with how his content was being found on search engines and other places on the web, but what I assume he was not aware of is how much traffic google is sending to the WSJ. According to Hitwise, Google accounts for 25% of the traffic sent to WSJ. This is a substantial amount of visitors to the site, but it will all be lost if he gets his way. Rupert Murdoch told the interviewer after a question of blocking the search engines that “I think we will”. This is just crazy talk because people are no longer willing to pay for news. Even loyal subscribers think what News corp is planning on doing is just out there. This is just a problem with the style of businesses that CEO’s like Murdoch are used to. They are in the generation that was not used to the internet and how it works. They are just catching up to speed and do not like what they see. If the board of News Corp was smart, they will decline his proposals and maybe hint that it is time for Murdoch to retire from this post. They need to take their media organization in a new direction and old style thinking is not going to do it. News Corp will become a sinking ship if they carry out their plans to cut off search engines. See the interview below for yourself. Please comment on what you think as we would love to know.

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