Yahoo announced Friday that they upped the limit from 50 to 250 for excluded, aka, negative keywords:
Excluded keyword limits have increased from 50 to 250 to help relevance
• Go to your Ad Group Settings page.
• Click on “Tactic Settings.”
• On the “Tactic Settings” page the “Excluded Words” feature is displayed.
• Click on “Excluded Words” to open the entry field.
• Add your excluded words but do not to use any commas or semicolons after each word.
• Click “Save Changes,” to process the Excluded Words list.
By all means, take advantage!
written by Jeff Hudson
Yahoo Indexes Adwords Tracking URLs
One of our SEO’s here pointed out this odd SERP from Yahoo this afternoon.
Take a look at results 1 & 3:
If you look at the tracking variables, these are clearly Adwords ads that have been indexed by Yahoo. Not only are they indexed, but they rank as #1 and #3 for this particular query. So, one would tend think about how this could screw up your analytics. Basically, if you were utilizing an java-based analytics program any conversion that came through this url would be attributed to your Adwords PPC campaign, at least on the surface. This would result in a couple things:
1. Your ROI for Adwords would be falsely inflated.
2. If it happened on a large enough scale for a big advertiser, you can see the potential ramifications.
3. Yahoo loses credit for any traffic it sends you organically, and eventually makes itself less relevant.
4. Google share price increases 
Update: Further discussion on this topic from SEORoundtable
written by Jeff Hudson
Some of you are still sorting through the carnage that is your recently converted Panama account trying to figure out where everything went. Hopefully I can save someone the 15 minutes I just wasted hunting around the new interface.
How to Delete a Campaign:
Yahoo Panama has a 20 campaign limit per account, unless you know Paris Hilton or Dick Cheney, in which case you can have 21. So, when I logged into one of the accounts I manage that was recently converted, I saw I couldn’t create a new campaign, which I desperately needed. So, next step, delete one of the old campaigns that is underperforming and replace with a new one, right?
OK, where do you delete the campaign?
>Dashboard Tab
>Scroll down to the Campaign name, click on it
>Look for the Campaign Button on the right side
>Click on the arrow for the pull down
>Select Delete
Please stop laughing now…it seriously took me 15 minutes, maybe more, to find that option. If I was a usability expert I could tell you why.
written by Jeff Hudson
I’m a couple days late on this news, but wanted to post it anyway. SEMPunch gave me a heads up to this post with a nice email, and it’s definitely relevant to my readers….in short:
SEMPunch used the Panama bulk upload function and then watched as the account was disabled and is unable to be recovered.
I have not verified or experienced this firsthand, but if it is a real bug, it’s a good one to know about.
Read more…
written by Jeff Hudson
A friend of mine is a stock analyst out in California. When it comes to money, he’s probably the smartest person I’ve ever met. He almost never loses, at anything. I’ve actually been in Vegas with him when the pit bosses told him to take his money and go home. He was killing them.
This is why I was so suprised when he told me, while on vacation last September, that he had a big position in Yahoo. Being someone who knows Yahoo better than a lot of people who work at Yahoo (ie, my reps), I obviously saw them as breathing their last gasps of air in the PPC market. Of course there was hype about Panama, yada yada yada yhoo.
Of course, technical analysis of stocks doesn’t exactly correlate to the day to day performance of a company, so I told him what I thought about Yahoo as a business, and he remained cautiously bullish on the stock price. Since then, I casually watched as the stock dropped, which made complete sense to me, and shook my head, wondering how my friend who is so smart could make such a bad pick. Fast forward to January, and Yahoo starts to rally in anticipation of Panama. So, as of today, the stock is almost exactly where it was in September. Where does it go from here?
My friend emailed me today and asked, “Do you think Yahoo has legs. Nice little rally from the low $20s.” Granted, I know absolutely squat about investing in stocks, but that never stopped me from having an opinion. Here’s my reply:
“There’s 2 factors:
1 – Their new quality score system – a la google adwords
2 – Their share of ad spend / inventory
Assuming their inventory levels stay the same they will make more money selling the same amount they are now. This quality score factor just got implemented this week. Go back and look at Google’s profitability as soon as they implemented their quality score. They did it 2x, the most recent being Fall 06. I bet you their profitability skyrocketed. What this system does is penalize poor ads/web sites by forcing them to pay through the nose to run ads, where before they could buy clicks for .10. The number of advertisers who drop out is far outweighed by the people who stay in the game and overpay for traffic that they undermeasure.
Look for a major jump in profits starting right now.
Secondly, they have to win back the ppc advertisers who told them to *** off because their system was a pain the ***. They seem to be making progress with it, but I don’t know for sure. They seem like they are trying, but I don’t believe in their current management team. They don’t really seem to understand, or be committed to, search marketing. They have the content game down pat, better than google by far, but their technology is so poor, and they do stupid things, like shut off their free tools that everyone likes to use.
Anyway, they need to keep improving their content, because it’s what drives the inventory, but they also need to get serious about engineering. If I was them I would offer the top 3-5 engineers at google some type of package they can’t refuse. Something.
It’s there for them to take, they just need to execute better.”
So, we shall see what the future holds. Maybe my friend is right, maybe Yahoo has legs. What do you think? Buy or sell?
written by Jeff Hudson
Yahoo apparently read my suggestions yesterday and quickly came up with revised strategy for their keyword tool
We do have plans to offer a new public keyword research tool, which would be hosted through Yahoo! and available to our API partners. We plan on making this new tool available later this year.
So, again, Yahoo makes another poor strategic decision. If you were Yahoo, wouldn’t you wait until you had this new tool ready before you basically quit supporting the old tool? At that point you would make the requisite PR push, promoting your new, improved search platform and hey look at the new tools we’re building for you.
This whole Yahoo Google thing somehow reminds me of the ABA/NBA (if you are too young for that reference I’m sorry). The ABA was clearly superior in style (better uniforms, Moses Malone and Dr. J, afros, mutli-colored ball), but the NBA was smarter, and got the core business fundamentals right, and now no one knows about the ABA. That’s what we will have in 15 years. My kids will be asking me why I cry when I read a story about Yahoo. I’ll say, oh, if you could have only seen Yahoo play in their prime…
sniff sniff.
***UPDATE – The inventory tool is now back online, mysteriously
written by Jeff Hudson
Overture Inventory Tool Going Away -
I just got off the phone with my Yahoo rep, and while he was handling something else for me, I asked him outright if the Inventory Tool was going away permanently. His response was that if the external tool doesn’t go away completely, it would probably be changed to a tool that doesn’t show exact search volume, but rather a bar graph style volume ‘indicator’. Ala the Adwords Estimator (my words not his).
He also noted you can get the search volume information from inside your Panama account. Obviously this is a strategic move by Yahoo, basically, you’re encouraging people to open a Yahoo account in order to have access to their ‘premium’ keyword tools. On the otherhand, you’re possibly discouraging people from ever coming to visit ‘yahoo search’ by ridding yourselves of the only external search advantage that you had over the Big Gorilla. Maybe a better move would be to host a trimmed down version of the inventory tool at a domain like estimates.yahoo.com, and integrate the new tool with panama marketing and branding, and hey, here’s an idea- A direct link to sign up and create a Yahoo Panama account!? Ah, what do I know, I’m just an advertiser…
Honestly, Google Adwords estimator has been my tool of choice for some time, mostly due to the ease of exporting the data into excel format. Overture was always a pain with cutting and pasting, not to mention the dubious accuracy of that data in the first place. Researching a keyword niche with volume indicators instead of exact query data is like looking at a clock without numbers on it. If you’ve done it long enough, you just kind of know what time it is, and looking at the hands on the clock tell you all that you need to know.
Here are some other tools to help in your keyword research:
Larry’s Little Keyword Tool
Larry’s Little Keyword Tool – With Cost Estimates
Dependency-based Word Similarity
MSN – Not great but getting better
Keyword Combinations 1.06- Got your root terms and modifiers? Now mix and match
Quintara - For those who like to ’see’ things.
And my absolute all time favorite keyword site, still free after all these years
5minutesite.com
***EDIT
And props to keyworddiscovery.com for not falling asleep at the wheel. Check out their new PPC ad:
Inventory Tool Gone
Get The Top Rated Keyword Inventory
Tool Now. Best Overture Replacement
www.KeywordDiscovery.com
written by Jeff Hudson
This blog is new to me, but I’m a big fan of ‘minnesoda’, so I’m glad that Marty from Minnesota took a hard look at Yahoo Panama and called out their geo-targeting quirks.
According to Yahoo “Duluth Hotel” can show up anywhere in the country when someone searches for it regardless of any campaign geo-targeting. It also would display for searches for “hotel + zip code.” The only true IP targeting being offered in Panama is for keywords which do not actually include a geographic prefix or suffix. “Hotel,” geo-restricted to Florida would only be displayed in Florida. “Florida Hotel†(if it displays at all) is be shown anywhere the phrase is queried on Panama regardless of any geo-targeting of the search.
written by Jeff Hudson
This is being covered to death already, so I will make it short and sweet. Yahoo just woke up, read the news about Google’s $500 share price, and realized that the key to search engine profitability is:
NON – TRANSPARENCY
Uh, really?
Here’s the lowdown on the email everyone got this morning:
Before = Transparency:
After = Mystery Clicks
I just want you all to know that I could bid jam with the best of them. Those fun days will be over too soon.
*sob
written by Jeff Hudson
First things first: The image verification is gone.
Please excuse me while I get up and do a little Ocho Cinco merengue around my cube.
I’m just starting to get into the account and play around with the interface. It doesn’t look like Adwords and it doesn’t look like Adcenter. It has it’s own look and feel, and is somewhat confusing at first glance but as you spend time with it, there are some interesting features.
First impressions?
Logging into the main dashboard I’m presented with the following modules: Alerts, Performance/Account Summary, and a list of the top campaigns. The design is bland, so from a GUI perspective, functional but underwhelming. I’ll give them a pass on this for now. I’m more interested in what’s under the hood.
If I select one of my campaigns from the dashboard I’m taken to the campaign overview page. From here I can do everything I need to, which is quickly generate graphs that show my clicks, impressions, and cost over the last 7 days. I can edit the campaign settings, or create an adgroup. Or, I can drill down into an existing adgroup. All basic functions, easily accessible, it just takes the eyes a few minutes to adjust to the ‘different’ layout. The campaign settings button is a drop down that offers:
Tactic Settings – choose content match, sponsored search, and match type
GeoTargeting – choose geo targeting, or specific region (city targeting or state/province). there are some adwordesque features here with maps and such, but I couldn’t get them to work at the time of this review.
Delete
At the adgroup level Panama starts to get a little more interesting. At the top you see your ad creative with a quick overview of it’s performance.
Display Rate (%): 100.0 CTR (%): 5.32 Clicks: 8 Quality Index: (*bar*)
We also have the defacto keyword list with the current bids and status and performance numbers you would expect to see. Continue drilling down to the keyword level and what do we have?
Slider bars!
I’m a fool for fancy graphics with slider bars. I can move the slider across the graph and it immediately displays the:
estimated monthly clicks
estimated average position
estimated share of available clicks —Pay attention to this
What will be interesting to see is how accurate these estimates are. We know how challenged Adwords has been with this regard. My first instinct is that this may be too much information to share with advertisers. As much as we curse google for not sharing the secret recipe behind everything, there’s a purpose to it. We’ll see if this feature stays for the long term, and I’ll use the hell out of it while it’s here.
Overall, I’m intrigued with the updates and I look forward to getting to know the system better than I do now. I see potential, and think Yahoo, at the very minimum, has gone a long ways towards getting back in the game.
I’ll try to look into the features with more detail, including reporting, in the coming weeks.
written by Jeff Hudson
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