Dangerous Thinking

At Web Positioning Centre, we use a wide toolkit of measures to promote of clients’ sites – Organic and PPC, Managed and Viral Linking, Technical and content-based approaches.

They certainly take care of increasing traffic through higher positions on natural searches or carefully conceived advertisement campaigns. But sometimes we find we have to look more closely at a client’s Web site, too.

We can find, for example:

Usability issues such as menuing systems that thwart the visitor’s attempts to navigate the site.

Badly conceived sales funnels which serve to confuse and/or demand too many clicks. Sometimes it’s just too complicated to make a sale and the shopping basket gets abandoned.

Insufficient sales copy. Some e-commerce sites rely on photographs, alone, to make the sale. Their owners haven’t learned from catalogue selling, where the copy is the clincher. While our optimized content often tackles a large part of this issue, often we need to look at the site as a whole and produce non-optimized selling copy, as well as some more general and corporate material to ensure that prospective purchasers feel happy about doing business with our client.

We see SEO as the most important part of the online marketing for a site. But sometimes shortcomings of the site itself need to be addressed before a client can reap the full benefits of our work.

YSM (Yahoo Search Marketing) is junking the long descriptions in its ads. No longer do we have 190 characters to get over our message, but we have just 70, instead – the current short description.

I’ll leave it to YSM to explain why:

Why are we making this change?
We’ve found that ads written more concisely give users a better experience and generally get better results. Users are exposed to higher quality search ads and advertisers may attract more interested and enthusiastic potential customers.

I wonder if this is really true. Longer rubbish copy doesn’t get you anywhere, but longer good-quality copy normally out-performs shorter copy on line as it does off line. I think, instead, Yahoo! is just continuing to make YSM more and more like Google Adwords.

What happened to the idea of brand differentiation? Why should I ever buy a pale imitation of the original or the market leader, unless it’s significantly cheaper.

I do hope that YSM will tell me a compelling reason for recommending YSM to my clients – for Yahoo’s sake, as well as mine.

As regular readers of this blog may have realised, I’m not a great fan of Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM). However, on the face of it, they seem to be gradually getting their act together by launching their Panama update.

Luckily, we set up a US YSM account for one of our clients last year, so we have been able to look at what’s happening – you did realise that for every country you want to run YSM ads in, you need to set up a separate account, and run them individually? Because YSM doesn’t cover anything like every major country in the world – whatever happened to that India account I enquired about in September, or thereabouts, last year? – you can’t even make a decent fist of a worldwide campaign.

I’ve tried running a YSM campaign in five countries. It was bloody, involving loads of duplicated effort and mind-numbing inconsistencies in advertisement approval rules between Yahoo! territories. It’s an experience I don’t want to repeat again too soon.

Google Adwords is so much easier and more cost-effective in terms of management time for our clients than YSM. Google lets me target a large list of countries, or a localized campaign right down to a circle around a particular Postcode (even more flexibility in some countries) all from one Campaign definition.

If I seem to be making a general critique of YSM rather than the Panama update, it’s because it seems to be just window-dressing, failing to tackle the real structural problems Yahoo! has with its Pay Per Click offering. Sure, introducing Ad Groups will make day-to-day management easier if you’re running a campaign in the US – we’re still waiting for Panama in the rest of the world.

But it still doesn’t look as if Yahoo! is going to integrate its YSM territories anywhere soon. That would be a real win for advertisers and agencies. And for Yahoo!

OK. Back to Panama. The new screens look better considered than the old horrors. But I also wonder of they’ve made a howling mistake in following the Google Adwords model so slavishly and jettisoning YSM’s real USP, its transparency of bidding. It’s what many professionals like. And it’s no longer there. YSM has come over all mysterious like Adwords when it comes to what we actually pay for a click.

So permit me a not-so-polite yawn and allow me to go back to recommending and using Google Adwords for most client campaigns.

When I review prospective clients’ running Adwords campaigns, I find the same mistakes being made over and over again. Here are some of them:

1. Buying searches on the company name - many, if not most, companies or sites rank well on organic/natural searches for their own name. Why bother to buy clicks when you’re already on the first page for organic searches?

2. Not using Ad Groups - you’ll be paying more for your clicks as you’ll be sacrificing relevance

3. Always aiming for the top spot - positions 2-5 often perform just as well, and many PPC professionals report that they get fewer tyre-kickers from the lower positions

4. Bidding on too many keywords (phrases) – focus on the key phrases that are doing best for you and Google will reward you with higher positions and/or lower bid requirements

5. Not tracking conversions - make sure you’re using the tracking code on your site, because traffic levels are only part of the story. Make sure you know the ROI on your campaign

6. Using PPC for branding - no, no, no. It’s a direct response medium. If you must spend money on branding, do it in a more effective way

7. Not understanding where break-even lies - OK, it’s related to 5, but what happens when your cost per click doubles? Do you carry on? Or do you wait for the market to cool? Selling at a loss rarely makes sense, unless you have a structured sales back-end

8. Buying traffic for the sake of it (having no strategy) – all traffic isn’t good traffic. Make sure you’re buying relevant traffic, even if the clicks are a bit more expensive

9. Not understanding the principles of good advertising copy - you can either see writing PPC ads as being simple, totally dictated by the low character count, or you can work hard at applying the proven rules of good copywriting to that small space. Get it right, and you’ll give the competition a drubbing

10. Thinking that Google Adwords is a straight auction for positions - it’s amazing how many people think it is. Google mixes in other factors such as relevance and past performance to skew what you need to pay. Read all the information on the Google Adwords site and make sure you actively manage your campaign

Are you making these kind of mistakes with Adwords?

I don’t usually use this blog for letting off steam or having a good rant, but I’m going to make an exception in the case of Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM).

Yesterday, after a weekend away and in a really good frame of mind, I logged into YSM, ready to set up a campaign for a client in plenty of time for the start next week (even with YSM’s mad window of up to 10 days (I kid you not!) for ad approval) – and found a message saying:

SEARCH LISTINGS MANAGEMENT ISSUES:
We are aware of current difficulties in adding, modifying or deleting listings and are working to correct the problem. Please check back for updates.

OK. I’ll check back tomorrow, I thought, in my post-Parisian glow.

The same message is there today – with no ETA for a fix, you’ll notice. It may have been there since last Friday, for all I know. The pages within have error messages where the data should be. The service is currently as useful as the proverbial chocolate fireguard.

I e-mailed support and was told they might just get back to me if they felt like it within 24-48 hours.

What is it that Yahoo! uses for communication? A retired gent as a runner, shouldering a leather satchel? Clapped out carrier pigeons? Second class mail?

Yahoo certainly gives clients and SEM professionals like me a second class service. I’m reminded why I almost always point my clients towards Google Adwords, unless they have a large enough budget to warrant our fees for having to deal with the positively Victorian-feeling Yahoo edifice.

This kind of thing is another reminder why Yahoo is scratching around way behind in Google’s slipstream generally.

Update (12 October): YSM’s errors have disappeared, and so I can get on with setting up the campaign, two days late. I’m still waiting for an answer to one of my questions from YSM support.