the PPC Book|Pay Per Click Blog | Long Tail Thoughts in a Short Tail World

G-Man at SEOMoz posted an interesting interview with Shoemoney yesterday. The most interesting part of the interview to me was the very frank and accurate assessment of what it takes to succeed with a campaign in Yahoo (currently):

Yahoo - I think Yahoo search marketing is crappy. It’s really the red headed stepchild of all the big 3 ppc engines. Their quality control is so hit and miss. Basically, the key with Yahoo is you just have to hammer the piss out of it. Upload 10,000 keywords and 8,000 will get denied. Upload those 8,000 keywords and 6,500 will get denied. Upload those and, well, you get the point. I guess it just depends on who is looking at your keyword to see if it’s denied or not. Keep hammering away and you will get in tons of 10 cent keywords.

Secondly, and most people will ignore this tidbit, but he talks about automating the transfer of search logs from his site and turning them into keywords.

Ok, check this out. I have a ringtone site that I log searches on (searches people do in the site); this is live data. I know what is hot in the ringtone industry in like 0 second time. I can automate this with apis so that it bids 0 second too on ppc->affiliate.

eCommerce sites should pay special attention to this strategy. If 90% of searches are unique, the ones you see on your own website are the most valuable you can find anywhere. And, they’re yours!