How the Search Alliance is Paying Off: Charts, Tips and Takeaways from the Experts at SMX Advanced Seattle

The final session I attended today was How the Search Alliance is Paying Off for Search Marketers, which included a presentation from Efficient Frontier’s Director of Business Analytics, Dr. Siddharth Shah and concluded with a combination panel discussion and audience Q&A with Bing Search Evangelist Teresa Elliot and Yahoo!’s Joe Stephens, a Regional Lead Search Strategist.

Dr. Shah, or “Sid” as everyone called him, kicked off the session with an overview explaining his position with Efficient Frontier, which flowed into the analysis he and his team did on data before and after the Search Alliance transition last year.   Let’s start with click share:

While the debate has been raging about whether the Search Alliance has been a win for advertisers or not, the data Dr. Shah’s team gathered has found that improvements in overall traffic quality has resulted in improvements in ROI:

In addition to the search metrics, the content network was referred to more than once (the smaller, more narrow the box in the below graphic, the more consistent the performance).

One of the key points he touched on that was reiterated throughout the session is that advertisers shouldn’t overlook the combined Yahoo! and Bing content network, especially for campaigns that focus on the financial services or health care categories.

Tips for advertisers to get the most out of the Search Alliance:

• Yahoo! Search and Bing traffic is of higher quality than ever before.
• Pay attention to your adCenter campaigns, they account for 20-25% of your paid search traffic.
• Experiment with the content network, the results may surprise you.
• And last, but not least…

Key takeaways from the panel discussion/audience Q&A:

From Joe Stephens (Yahoo!): If you tested content in Panama and found that your results weren’t that great, you should try it again now in adCenter; it’s a whole new world, a completely different product.  The content marketplace hasn’t really matured yet due to lack of advertisers not using network, presenting an untapped opportunity.

Teresa Elliot (Bing): The combined marketplace has higher quality ad and stronger ROI, but CPCs haven’t caught up… now’s the time to take advantage.

Sid Shah (Efficient Frontier): Best way to take advantage is to identify keyword gaps (run Search Query and Quality Score reports, expand with Microsoft Advertising Intelligence). 

Joe Stephens (Yahoo!):  The adCenter quality filters are strong, so focus on fewer keywords and higher relevance to landing page.  Best case scenario would be top 20% high volume keywords tightly aligned to custom landing pages.  Have as much keyword coverage as possible and take care not to let broad match take care of everything.  Run a Search Query report to show all queries your bidded terms are being matched to via phrase and broad.  You can use this information to expand and optimize…. definitely take advantage of the free Microsoft Advertising Intelligence download, it’s an outstanding tool that the Yahoo! reps use daily.

When thinking of quality scores, the most important is click through, second most important is landing page. Run quality score reports and look for high volume keywords with poor performance (low qs score).  Alternately, look at high volume, good performance to identify what’s working well.

Teresa Elliot (Bing): Also be sure to take advantage of using dynamic text, param2.  Include several instances of your keyword on your landing page, adCenter will favor that; it has to be HTML visible text or the crawlers won’t see it.

Sid Shah (Efficient Frontier): 90% of Google’s quality score is CTR… can be proven mathematically.

Best practices for being successful with adCenter:

• There’s a big keyword gap between Panama and the Yahoo! and Bing combined marketplace due to advance match vs. broad match; you might have had 1k keywords driving traffic in Pananma, it’s maybe 700 now.  That gap is the tail, lower volume, but higher quality traffic in return.  There’s a huge opportunity in expanding keywords using search query report -- work on closing the gap, but don’t rely on broad match alone.
• Focus on bidding explicitly by match type.  Broad match traffic doesn’t convert at the same rate as exact, test to see what works for your goals and budget.
• Negative keywords work differently in adcenter than they do in Google.  There’s currently no concept of negative exact, so if you import your Google campaigns w/ negatives, you’ll be blocking a lot of your traffic without realizing it.  The account management teams at Yahoo! can help identify and resolve these issues, but self-managed advertisers should be aware of this point if not already.
• Leverage the adCenter quality scores to identify where you need help with your landing pages or keyword relevance. The reports are extremely useful and easy to use, you can quickly identify where problems and opportunities are.
• Can’t emphasize enough expanding tail terms to close the gap… use MAI in concert with your Search Query reports.
• Content presents opportunity for incremental traffic, supplemental to paid search – be sure to use distribution controls to refine and control where your ads are shown.