Internet Marketing Blog

Yahoo Sponsored Search provides tracking URLs if you click on Administration, then Tracking URLs. When enabled, they append various parameters to your ad URLs so that downstream tracking will show information about ad clicks. The two most useful parameters are OVKEY and OVRAW which together provide substantial insight into how well your campaign focuses on […]

Seattle, WA (AFNews) April 1, 2009 — Web 1 Marketing, Inc. has purchased the web search business of Yahoo!, Inc. “We are pleased to welcome Yahoo! Search to our team,” said Josh Freedman, President of Web 1 Marketing, Inc. “We look forward to the synergies of our two organizations to combine effortlessly, providing our customers […]

Yahoo! has just announced new ways to target particular users: Demographic Targeting Ad Scheduling Enhanced ZIP-level geo-targeting All of the big three search engines have been offering some version of geographic targeting for some time. Yahoo! finally added rich scheduling functionality, a lot like that offered by AdWords. Microsoft adCenter has offered demographic targeting for […]

This post was prompted by many discussions with clients in which we attempt to summarize SEO and PPC performance in practical, easily digestible forms. There is frequently a tendency for clients to oversimplify evaluations to “it works” or “it doesn’t” based upon summary data. For SEO, we try to summarize performance in terms of increases […]

Here’s a tip for finding negative keywords for PPC campaigns as well as websites to link to for linking campaigns. Set up Google Alerts for those keywords your advertising on. Depending on the popularity of your keyword(s) you should start receiving emails from Google pretty quickly with links to various articles, blogs and websites. It’s […]

In recent weeks we have had two client accounts on AdWords “hijacked.” Someone was able to discover or hack the passwords for two different email logins, presumably either by inadvertent disclosure or use of weak / easy-to-guess passwords. Campaigns were created that targeted keywords related to screen savers and loans, and the ads took users […]

If you’re running a national SEM campaign, it may be desirable to exclude all local queries so that you can optimize the ad language for non-geographic queries and users. To target specific locales, you could setup additional campaigns that are better optimized for those sets of keywords. The best way to exclude location-based queries is […]

The 10,000 lb. gorilla is getting heavier. So says a recent report by comScore. Google sites (www.google.com, www.aol.com, etc.) increased their market share in December to 47.3%, compared to 28.5% for Yahoo and 10.5% for Microsoft. The numbers themselves aren’t as important as the trends: Google continues to grow, Yahoo grew more percentage-wise and thus […]

Yahoo! has announced the availability of their new Sponsored Search program to select advertisers. It is being rolled out to advertisers in stages, and you can either wait for them to get to your account, or you can request an early upgrade. We have yet to take the new system for a test drive, but […]

Several months ago we blogged on reporting errors encountered at Yahoo Sponsored Search. These issues were never resolved, and we continue to run into others. We are particularly frustrated by the fact that location-based campaigns do not produce reports that break out cost and performance for each location. Really. We have contacted Yahoo support about […]