MAXIMIZING YOUR CAMPAIGN

Spring Cleaning for Your Ads

Now's the time to add keywords and enhance your creative to reach more customers shopping for Father's Day, graduations and other seasonal events

Put away your winter coats and dust off your springtime search listing campaigns: Father's Day, graduations, wedding, summer vacations and assorted outdoor activities are just around the corner. Yahoo! Search Marketing's editorial team is ready for your submissions, so now is the time to present your spring-focused ads so you can reach customers actively planning gift and travel purchases.

Over the next couple of weeks, set aside some time to develop and submit your spring and summer offerings. Uploading your ad requests early will give you more time to fine-tune your titles and descriptions, which can help you attract more business over the coming months. For a list of popular Father's day and graduation-related search terms from this time last year, click here.

A Gift for You
Speaking of fine-tuning, here are some optimization tips that come directly from our editorial team:

• Position your keyword prominently in both title and description, and include your brand.
• Write multiple ads for each ad group, and turn on ad optimization to display the best performing ads most often.
• Create ad groups specific to your product categories and write appropriate ads, i.e.. "mp3 players" vs. "wireless phones".
• Plan ahead for short-term promotions.
• Include special messaging, when appropriate, on:
• Pricing and promotions
• The end date of promotions
• The last date for on-time delivery
• Multi-channel options, such as in-store pick up
• Use custom titles and descriptions for your algorithmic listings via Yahoo!'s Search Submit product to help increase your click-through and conversion rates from that source of traffic.

Increase the Quantity and Quality of Your Traffic
Now that you are ready to submit your seasonal spring submissions and you have some good optimization advice, why not utilize some of our product features and tools that are designed to save you time and effort? After all, any time you can save in managing your account can be used for running your business or, better yet, spent on summer activities. Here are two suggestions for saving you time and delivering results:

1. Advanced match type
Generate more leads: The Advanced match type will display your ads for searches that closely relate to the keywords, titles and descriptions, and/or web content associated with those ads, helping deliver more customer leads to your business.

Save time: Because the Advanced match type is designed to target additional customers based on the content of your existing ads and/or web content, you can save time and effort in the creation and management of additional new ads.

Block potentially irrelevant searches: To keep your results relevant and focus your budget on the likeliest customers, use the excluded words feature to block certain searches that you believe will not apply to your products or services. You may specify up to 45 excluded words to apply to your entire account, as well as up to an additional 45 excluded words for each keyword.

More information on the Advanced match type

2. Conversion Analytics
Our free, easy-to-use tracking feature takes the guesswork out of search advertising campaigns. Conversion analytics provides you with conversion and assist data (including count, rate and cost-per-conversion) at the keyword, campaign and account level for both match types, so you know exactly how each of your keywords is performing.

More information on conversion analytics