I can see the video before I click the ad!

With Google seemingly rolling out ad extensions every month, the Bing/Yahoo Search Alliance has lagged frightfully behind in terms of ad innovation. Until now.

Rich Ads in Search (RAIS) is a hybrid answer to Google’s Ad Sitelinks Extensions and Product Listing Ads.

We’ll walk through getting RAIS setup, and the results you stand to gain from running them.

What is RAIS?

It’s a new ad format Beta in Yahoo which will show up to 4 sitelinks along with an image or video.

It looks like this in the wild:

Ooooh! Pretty.

RAIS details (for now…):

• Only applies to branded terms
• Only exact match type keywords

How do you setup RAIS?

I’m not going to lie, this is a bit daunting. Our friendly Yahoo reps sent over a massive spreadsheet that needed to be filled in to launch the ads.

You’ll need all your ad images to conform to the following:

• 80 x 60 pixels
• 4KB maximum file size
• Accepted formats – .png, .jpg, .gif, .jpe

Here’s a smattering of the other specs for RAIS:

And this is only *one* of the ad formats…

What kind of performance can you expect from RAIS?

I ran a test campaign for one of our retail clients. The campaign is running on identical keywords as our normal branded campaign, the control in this case.

In a week’s worth of performance, this is how the RAIS campaign performed against the control:

Top-of-the-funnel brilliance.

I expected click interest to spike, but here were the most interesting findings:

• Click-through Rate (CTR) went from 4% to 32% in some cases
• Last-click conversion rate fell 67%
• Assisted conversion rate sky-rocketed 262%

While this was a limited test specific to the retail space, it’s interesting to see not only how dramatic the effect was on click-through, but how seeing an image lent itself to repeat visits and purchases.

Talk to your Yahoo reps and get into this Beta. At the very least, it will give new life into your Branded efforts. If you’ve experimented with RAIS, let me know how it’s worked for you in the comments.

The post The New Yahoo Rich Ads in Search (RAIS) Beta appeared first on Portent.

• You can set the time zone to the audience time zone or the account setting time zone.
• Easy edit friendly dashboard to change the hours in which the ads show. All the hours show in one long drop down, not much scrolling needed.
• You can incrementally increase by percentage and dollar amount! Being able to increase my bid by 0.05 or 0.30 without doing the math of percentages? Sold!

Here’s my wish list:

• Bulk edits by weekend, weekday. Editing each and every single day is tiresome.
• Edits by hour. Since the ability to bid by dollar amount is there, I would love to see the ability to increase my bids by .50 during the hours of 11am and 3pm, for example.
• When I click on any of the boxes within the chosen day, it would be nice if the hour that I clicked on was automatically listed as the “start” time instead of midnight being the default.

Ok now that you’ve gone through and set the hours and bids that you want, click “apply” and magically your chosen hours will populate that previously empty box on the campaign settings page.
Let’s move on to Demographic Bidding.
Click “edit” and check the “turn on demographic reporting for this campaign” to start the adjustments. Like the Google Content Network, you can block the 17 yr olds and under, but not any of the other age ranges. Simply click the “Adjust Bid” button next to the gender or age group you wish to increase bids for and like the ad scheduling tool, you can choose to increase by percentage or dollar amount.


The high points:

• Being able to increase by dollar or percentage amount.
• Finally being able to target by age and gender!
• It looks like once the tool is enabled you’ll be able to see data on Impressions and Clicks for the age ranges you’re targeting. Mine aren’t old enough to have any data yet, but this is very cool.

My wish list:

• Be able to exclude age groups or genders beside the 17 and under category
• Being able to decrease the bid based on an age group or gender.

Enhanced Geographic Targeting isn’t something I’ve played with yet. I just don’t have the need right now for it, but according to Yahoo it sounds useful:
“Available for both Sponsored Search and Content Match, you can mix and match geo-targeting settings at different levels within the same campaign or ad group. New dynamic mapping features help you select individual ZIP codes and ZIP codes surrounding them.”
Overall, this is great. Finally a better mousetrap in terms of Yahoo Search Marketing. My only complaint overall is that on your main dashboard the column that is called “Targeting” doesn’t show up. I got it to show up once, on a fluke I guess, and luckily I got a screenshot.

The elusive Targeting column lets you know which campaigns have geographic, ad scheduling and demographic targeting enabled.
But it is only the first day after all. What do you think of the new Yahoo features?

The post Yahoo Finally Gets a Clue and Adds Ad Scheduling & Demographic Bidding for You appeared first on Portent.

But then a client came along (me) that had a free $100 advertising credit if I opened a new Yahoo Search Marketing account. All I had to do was put down the minimum deposit of $30 to get the $100. Sounds like a great deal for the small business right? Right.

I went ahead and opened my new account, set everything up, selected keywords and ads and when it came time to pay the bill to get the account running the idea of Pay Pal seemed very attractive since I was dealing with such a small amount of money and it seemed like it would be very easy to do. And it was, I simply clicked the radio button for Pay Pal, logged in, verified the amount and the payee and I was off.

The only problem was that once I was off, I couldn’t stop. If you set up an account from scratch with Pay Pal selected as the payment method you must choose a deposit amount to go with your payment method, $30 or more. This is what I selected, but what I found was happening was that this is also an automatic refill option as well. You cannot opt out of yourself later on. So each time that Yahoo deemed my balance as low, it automatically was taking that $30 out of my Pay Pal account. As a seasonal advertiser, I just wanted to spend what I had, see what happened and then add funds if necessary and let the clock run out, so to speak.

Typically, through the credit card method if you’re doing the manual refill option you receive the email that you balance is low, you can login and assess whether or not you want to add funds and how much. In this case, I was unable to change the settings for Pay Pal. I could add a payment method of a credit card, switch that to my preferred method of payment and go from there, but the whole reason I chose Pay Pal was to avoid that issue.

So how do you fix it? (Short of scheduling a campaign end date and hoping that you spend all the funds before it closes.)

You have to ask a Yahoo representative. That’s the only way. Either by calling in and requesting that they check the little box in your account that allows you the freedom to do that or as I did and ask the agency representative what the deal was.
Not so convenient (that part) but overall is a great alternative to credit cards!

The post Paying your Yahoo Search Marketing bill with Pay Pal appeared first on Portent.