One of my clients spends a lot of money on search engine marketing and prior to joining this project, their PPC campaigns were just a little disorganized. The foundations of the campaigns were there, but some groupings were a little off to the point where they were affecting the quality scores. If you’re not familar with quality score and how it can affect your bid pricing and overall performance of your campaigns, check out Red Fly Marketing’s great article on increasing quality score!
Soon after starting my job, I was sent along with Ms. Danielle down to San Diego for a Yahoo Conference highlighting their new pay per click program. During their presentation, they had times for questions and answers and I pretty much asked “how much do i have to spend to get a dedicated representative?” They yahoo reps there didn’t really want to answer that question in such a public venue, but I kept pushing to see “so does $10k a month do it?” . . still no answer . . . “$20k?” . . . . finally, they crack and say that they have a soft number of about $10,000 per month. That made me happy since my company spends more than that per month, so I met up with the customer service reps after the conference and they set me up with a dedicated team by the following monday. I really have to commend Yahoo for such great customer service as I never have experienced anything like that with Google.
What I wanted to do was use Yahoo’s resources to build a solid foundation of campaigns and in order to do that, I exported all my Google Adwords information and sent them over to my Yahoo Rep. Once they received the information, they had a team of analysts go over my landing pages, keywords and ad copies to see what they could do to maximize my unlimited budget. Overall, their suggestions were very text book, but the one thing they did for me that helped me tremendously was they reorganized my keywords based on high and low volume clicks. If any of you have ever worked with Yahoo’s web based ppc system, you know it’s a pain in the ass to do mass changes.
So everything is set, but the time I have to constantly manage all the new keywords they set me up with is really short. My account rep tells me about their campaign optimizer which pretty much helps automate my bids to meet my preset goals.
First thing you want to do is select “Yes” and then set your monthly budget. If you’d like to see what Yahoo estimates your traffics going to be. Of course, this estimate is overly inflated, so don’t get too hyped.
Next, you’ll want to make sure you know your business because you will have to enter numbers that will guarantee you a positive return on your investment.
I used the Business Objective Target option because I have a good understand of my product’s metrics. The main metric I have to understand is the conversion rates of my landing pages. Once I have a good understanding of that, I will know what my cost per acquistion (Business Target Value) so that I could enter into the optimizer. The optimizer will do it’s best to divert more of the budget to high performing keywords and the adjust bids to acheive your target value.
Overall, the optimizer is great tool to add to the arsenal. I wouldn’t rely on it soley because they don’t control too many metrics, but it does save a little bit of time here and there.
Have any of you tried the optimizer? What are your impressions?
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