5. 2. How to Run Your Campaign with Yahoo! Search Marketing

Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) is one of the most expensive, and competitive pay per click search engines. If you are serious about generating targeted traffic to your site, but less bothered about minimum (or maximum!) bid amounts then you should consider signing-up with Yahoo! Search Marketing.

1. First of all, go to http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/ and sign up for the “Sponsored Search”. To start on your own, without assistance and fees, sign up for the Self Serve plan.

2. Before establishing your account, select your country and click “Continue”.

3. Now enter the 40 best keywords that you found in the box on the left of the page. With
Yahoo! you have the possibility to re-organize your keywords by category, which is very useful (Categories are names you assign to groups of keywords that are similar in a particular way, i.e., product type).

You can use the keyword suggestion tool if you couldn’t find enough keywords. You just have to enter your keyword in the keyword selection tool and click “Get Keywords”. To add one of these keywords, simply click the tick box next to the keyword and it will automatically be added.

Use the Keyword Assistant as well to select the most performing keywords:





Monthly Search Volume=number of searches the keyword received across Yahoo network in the last month.
Estimated Clicks =estimate of how many clicks you can expect to get over a month using a standard click-through rate of 5%.

Some search terms may have slightly lot of searches; nevertheless, it doesn’t mean that you will get numerous clicks and high conversion rates. As I explained before, it is better to have keywords which specifically target your customers. General search terms might not ensure you good return on investment.

4. Write the description for your keywords. You have the choice between writing the same description for all your keywords and creating a new description for each keyword.

Here is the structure of a description in Yahoo!:
Title (maximum 40 characters),
Description (maximum 190 characters)
Destination URL (maximum 1024 characters)
Follow the steps I mentioned with Google Adwords. Be careful that the URL you submit, links to the specific page on your site that most directly relates to the corresponding keyword.

5. Bid on each of your keywords. Keep in mind that with Yahoo! your position will depend on how much you bid. The higher you bid, the best position you will get. Before starting to bid, have a look on the top five maximum bids. That will be useful to determine your own maximum bid (you will only pay 1 cent more that the competitor under you).


6. Decide on your daily budget. Experiment with different daily budget amounts by entering currency figures and pressing the Calculate Estimates button to update the estimates. If you want to increase your traffic, consider increasing both your max bids and your budget, as only increasing your budget doesn't necessarily increase the number of impressions you get.

7. Sign up the form and enter your credit card details. After finishing this, you will be sent a validation e-mail. To finish, just complete the survey submitted by Yahoo! Now your campaign is on the way for success!