The match types and negative keywords you choose can help improve performance of your campaigns in adCenter

This is the latest in a series of articles that explains how Microsoft Advertising adCenter differs from Yahoo! Search Marketing. They’re intended to help Yahoo! advertisers prepare for the transition and become familiar with adCenter.

A “match type” refers to how your keyword is matched to a user’s search query. By adjusting the match types you use when bidding on keywords, you can potentially increase your traffic and click-through-rates (CTR) and decrease your cost-per-click (CPC).

While both adCenter and Yahoo! allow you to bid on different match types, there are several differences in the available match types and the levels at which you can bid on them. In Yahoo! Search Marketing, the two available match types have been Standard and Advanced. adCenter offers three match type options: broad, phrase and exact.

Search yourself and find out what your customers are saying

Have you searched yourself lately? More importantly, have you searched your company, your products or your coworkers? Stop blushing, because it’s perfectly normal and legal. And it’s a great way to gain business insights for which you would otherwise pay gobs of cash to research firms or social media monitoring tools. 

Utilizing search engines and poking around certain social spaces online is a rudimentary but insightful way to gather feedback on your own brand, site and products, while finding out what people like or don’t like about your competitors.

For example, here are some of the things we found for one (unfortunate) client at Nine by Blue recently:

• Competitive positioning: Dozens of instances online where people were comparing the client to their biggest competitors, freely and extensively chatting to their online groups in detail about what they liked or didn’t like about each.
• Marketing reaction: Conversations around the client’s email marketing and banner ads, which provided very insightful feedback. Bottom line: People didn’t like them. In fact, they abhorred them.
• Brand degradation: Some issues with this client were so bad, there were even Facebook groups created just to rant about them. One Facebook group gave instructions on how to abandon the client’s solution and use the client’s competitor’s solution.
• Dead people: On YouTube there was a video titled with the client’s name. The video was about a dead girl. 

So are you interested in conducting some of this research for yourself? Here’s how you can do it.

1. Search for love

People often write what they feel about something online without a filter. For example, feedback that might be given as “I like Brand X’s site more than Brand Y’s site because it is easier to navigate” in a focus group, might come out as “OMG WTF is wrong with Brand Y’s site? I can’t find anything!!! And those colors! Did someone just puke on my screen??? LOL” on Twitter. So let’s see how you can gather some of that unfiltered, acronym-rich sentiment, laden with misspellings, for yourself. 

New Yahoo! Sports branded entertainment series punks football fans

Last night, the Phillies won 4-2 over the Giants in the Game 5 of the National League Championship Series. I was watching at my local watering hole in San Francisco, surrounded by other Giants fans.

But, just as Phillies center fielder Shane Victorino rounded the bases to take a 3-1 Phillies lead, a victory cheer went up from a small contingent.

These were Phillies fans. In our bar.

They got a couple of death-stares and the bartender, Jake, asked, “Wonder what would have happened if a Giants fan had cheered our first run at a bar in Philly?” Never mind. In California we don’t get all that “fighty” about our sports (Raiders fans aside).

But you always take a risk when you go behind enemy lines.

And that’s just what a new, branded entertainment series from Yahoo! Sports does. “Behind Enemy Lines” is a 12-week online program, sponsored by Bud Light, that follows football fans as they go deep into rival territory. The show’s two hosts, Stephen Hale and Ben Gleib, play the straight men, “Jackass”-style, going into sports bars and tailgate parties, looking for good-hearted trouble.

Yahoo! and American Express OPEN offer unique, informative, branded content for growing businesses

The age of the “advertorial” is coming to an end. The age of branded content is dawning.

For years now, magazines and TV stations have been running paid-placement editorial and programming that look just like articles or TV shows, but are really little more than extended ads. People---smart people, that is---have figured this out and have tuned advertorial out the same way they have tuned out many traditional ads.

Branded content is different.

Branded content offers niche information that is valuable to users in a given demographic or affinity, but sponsored by a single advertiser. It’s all about news, entertainment and tools you can use.

The latest incarnation is the Yahoo!-American Express OPEN Business Solutions portal, designed to help small business owners succeed by offering timely content and useful tools.

Everything you need to know about how your ad dollars are allocated and spent on adCenter

This is the latest in a series of articles that explains how Microsoft Advertising adCenter differs from Yahoo! Search Marketing. They’re intended to help Yahoo! advertisers prepare for the upcoming transition and become familiar with adCenter.

By the end of this month, you will be able to advertise on Yahoo! Search, Bing and our partner sites with one account in Microsoft Advertising adCenter. So now is the perfect time to learn how budgeting, bidding and billing work in adCenter, and how they differ from what you’re used to with Yahoo! Search Marketing. This will help you to maximize performance for both engines and take advantage of the increased traffic during and after the transition period.

Budgeting in Microsoft adCenter

Microsoft adCenter requires that you set a monthly budget at the campaign level, whereas Yahoo! Search Marketing allows you to set your daily spending limit at the account and/or campaign levels. When a Yahoo! campaign is transferred into adCenter, the Yahoo! daily spend limit will be multiplied by 30 to create a monthly budget in adCenter, then divided evenly across your campaigns.

As you know, during this period when ad serving is transitioning, your traffic volume on adCenter is likely increasing while your Yahoo! Search Marketing traffic is decreasing. This means that you’ll need to closely monitor your budgets in both platforms during the next week, and make adjustments as needed.

Yahoo!’s Retail Pulse says to get ready for the holidays

You wouldn’t be surprised to know that Halloween terms rose sharply in search as we got closer to October, but did you know searches have been climbing since the first week of July? And that Christmas shopping terms started to jump in the middle of last month?

The Retail Pulse Report from Yahoo! Insights summarizes key changes in U.S. online consumer behavior, and packages them for retailers. The weekly report measures Yahoo! Search behavior in retail categories, key Yahoo! property usage (including Yahoo! Shopping), and off-Yahoo! network activity on selected retail sites. According to the report, consumers have grabbed onto the spooky spirit of Halloween early, with terms rising roughly 25% starting in July and spikingin the middle of September:

• “Halloween costume” is on track to be one of the most searched terms in the Holiday and Observance category (second only to “black friday”).
• Costume category search terms seeing the

For brands, social media is about creating a digital bazaar

Back to the future: Social media has reintroduced peer-to-peer interaction just like in medieval bazaars.

Pivotcon’s grand finale was a rousing tour-de-force by Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age. In the style of your favorite college professor, Rushkoff enthralled the crowd with his comparison of social media to medieval Europe. “Mass marketing simulates what used to be peer to peer interactions in the town center,” he said, “but now the bazaar conversation is back.” 

This interaction is based on facts, not myths---especially brand myths. Nobody is going to talk on Facebook about the Keebler elves, but they may talk about how the cookies are made and what the ingredients are. Damage control works great in social media, Rushkoff said, because it is fact-based: “We screwed up and we’re sorry.”

Connect the connected

The challenge for brands is to provide information that increases a consumer’s reputation when he shares it. “Social networks are not meant for brands,” he said, “but you can give people the fuel to make connections with each other.” Don’t just try to get Facebook followers, he says, since that’s not the purpose of Facebook. Try to get your followers to connect with each other.

In Day Three’s previous sessions, Steven Rosenbaum, CEO of Magnify.net, talked about the well curated brand experience, using Whole Foods as an example of a company with a crystal clear brand identity. The very concept of brands is relatively new, he added, and mostly a product of the television age. In the digital age, we may find that it’s hard to succeed in social media when you’re a huge brand.

Coffee retailer and lifestyle brand launches the Starbucks Digital Network in 6,800 of its U.S. stores

Yahoo! is all about connecting, informing and entertaining people, but we haven’t mastered the technology for serving up the perfect Doppio Espresso Macchiato in a “third place” environment. Luckily, we've got the perfect partner for that.

Customers who use free Wi-Fi at more than 6,800 U.S. company-operated Starbucks cafés now have access to the Starbucks Digital Network. Anyone with a Wi-Fi enabled laptop, tablet or smartphone can surf the Yahoo!-powered network, which is only available at these stores.  

While the SDN is all about Starbucks, Yahoo! plays a pivotal behind-the-scenes role. As the coffee brand’s technology partner, Yahoo! developed the site, hosts the network, powers the search experience, and provides “snackable content” for visitors.