Monthly Archives: May 2009

Yahoo Quality Index Much Like AdWords Quality Score

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A better quality advertisement on Yahoo can allow you to obtain higher rankings in their pay per click search marketing without increasing your cost per click.

Yahoo Quality Index
Much like the Google Quality Score that I wrote about recently Yahoo has their version which they call the Yahoo Quality Index. Essentially they are trying to determine if you have a relevant advertisement. They wish to present quality advertisements to visitors of their site. The better your Quality Index of your advertisement, the more likely you will achieve a high ranking position in relation to other ads and spend less money than others that have a lower Quality Index score.

How is the Quality Index Computed
To compute the Quality Index Yahoo looks at your advertisement, the keywords in the ad, the keywords you are targeting, how many clicks you receive and how you compare to others that are your competition.

What is Good and What is Bad
When reading the Google Quality Score a 1 is bad and a 10 is best. For Yahoo Quality Index they show a bar with 1 to 5 bars, 1 is bad and 5 is best.

How to Increase Your Quality Score
To increase your quality score you need to micro manage your advertisements and campaigns. Create ads that incorporate your keywords, either hard code them by typing the word in the ad or use their “insert keyword” function. [Note: When using the insert keyword be careful to check that inserting a keyword will make sense when the full ad is being read by a user]. Therefore the more relevant your keywords to your ads the more likely your score will be higher.

Also, although Google and Yahoo have not said this (at least I cannot find it) I firmly believe from experience that the correlation between the keywords, the advertisement, and the landing page the advertisement is sending the individual to, makes a difference as well. So make sure your landing page correlates to the keywords you are using and the advertisement.

Conclusion
Manage your Yahoo ads much like you would your Google ads, optimize keywords – ads – and landing pages for the higher score, higher rank, and cheaper overall cost when compared to your competitors.

Social Media Domain, Blog, Twitter Account and Facebook Page

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Blog, Twitter, Facebook
These are a great way to start your social media setup. Particularly with WordPress as the blog, a Twitter account connected, and a Facebook page. Twitter and Facebook have such a large audience it makes good sense to start with them. Of course the realm of possible social media sites to participate in grows daily.

Getting Started
Getting started with a strong social media foundation typically begins with a blog, hosting, a unique domain, Twitter account and Facebook page all linked together.

It is suggested to obtain a unique domain right at the start so all the links in you work hard to obtain. As a blog WordPress is free, easy to use, and incredibly powerful due to all the plugins created for it. Obtain a hosting account from a provider such as GoDaddy which provides a WordPress hosting account, your domain and your off and running.

Consistent Naming
For branding purposes it is wise to obtain a domain name, Twitter account and Facebook page with the same name, such as longest.com for a domain and twitter.com/longest for a twitter account.

Social Brand Search provides a quick search of domains, Twitter names, and Facebook Pages. Go to Social Brand Search Here (it is free) and start choosing a name, then get your hosting and you are off and running. Social Brand Search searches for you and let’s you know which names are available.

Google AdWords Editor WARNING

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If you use AdWords and use the desktop AdWords Editor application you may need to double check the settings. I have noticed recently that some of the settings for a campaign within the Editor do not update my AdWords account. For example a new campaign created in the Editor was set for the content network and Relevant pages across the entire network, after multiple uploads of changes it was never sent to AdWords. When I looked in the campaign settings it was set to Relevant pages only on the placements I target. Obviously these are two completely different settings.

Double Check AdWords in the Browser
I strongly suggest you double check campaigns and campaign settings. I only noticed the discrepancy after a particular campaign was not yielding any impressions. At first I assumed it was just my fault, however that exact same issue has happened multiple times. Be sure to double check your settings and other campaign components.

Google AdWords Editor
If you do not use the editor I highly suggest you give it a try. The AdWords Editor is a software application you download for free from Google. It is very powerful, allowing you to set up campaigns, make editors, copy, paste and provides more management functionality than using AdWords through the browser. It also allows you to manage multiple accounts and manage accounts offline, you can make edits to campaigns and upload whenever you like. Get your free copy of the AdWords Editor from Google.

Google Trends vs. Compete, Alexa, Quantcast and Comscore?

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Google Trends for Websites
Google Analytics is WOW, Google Ad Planner is amazing, Google Trends – hmmm, not so much. It is as if they started to create Google Trends for Websites, heard the phone ring – answered the phone – had a long conversation, and forgot they ever started it in the first place. haha.

Do not get me wrong, I am truly amazed at most all Google products, especially when it comes to Google Analytics which is incredibly powerful. However, I am not sure what the point of the current Google Trends for Websites is. After using Quantcast, Alexa and Compete, and the pay-for-play Comscore, this makes you say ‘huh?’ Here is the basic graph you receive:

google_trends_twitter

Placeholder for World Domination?
It could very well be that Google is merely waiting for the right moment to unleash their own public web analytics after a certain threshold of Google Analytics users haev been met. Quantcast has a twofold method for providing site analytics, the traditional polling method and code on pages if the site owner opts for it (what they call quantified). Google has the same capabilities.

Google Search Bar
They can utilize their install base of the Google Search bar to obtain site analytics across the web. Much like Alexa does.

Google Analytics
Much like Quantcast, many site users have the Quantcast code on their site. This provides an accurate measurement of traffic to that site as opposed to extrapolation based on a sample size.

Sleeping Dog
Right now there is no reason to use the Google Trends for Websites, however that sleeping dog may awake, utilize Google Analytics installs and Search Bar installs to crush all others. Wow, what would that do to Comscore who charges and arm and a leg for their data? Comscore is probably not too happy about the Google Media Planner – now that is quite impressive.

Top 40 Twitter Tools

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Twitter Tools
Below is a list of various tools for twitter, there are many many more. Please add your comments with tools you use. This list is meant to cover as many utilities as possible. A special thank you to the twitter users that gave me their recommendations, a list is at the end. If you enjoy this list please link to it and to support this site please delicious bookmark this GoDaddy Promo Code(by clicking that link) article of mine. Much appreciated!


Twitter Tool List Has Been Moved Here

Build in Metrics and Reporting

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You need to determine the metrics of success for your business, then what drives them, then design your site to assure you can achieve them efficiently.

As an example, if you wish to have people register for a free service then later subscribe via PayPal to a monthly subscription to obtain additional features (a freemium model), you should plan out an optimized registration process and build it into your site as soon as possible.

Therefore, where do you promote the registration and how. What is the call to action, the registration path, and the path of least resistance in terms of collecting information to assure high conversion rates. Define that, build it in, and create your reporting.





Do not let reporting become an afterthought. Reports on your key metrics should be built in. How many registrations do you have per day, how many subscriptions, how many unique visitors, how many went to the registration page, how many converted, what percent. Then you can test once you have basic statistics. You may have to generate some information from your system and add information from a statistics package such as Google Analytics.

At the very least please determine what your metrics are, just take a look at your business plan. You can usually look at 1st year projections, or 2nd and 3rd and back into quarterly, monthly, daily goals. Then determine what metrics from your site/service need to be tracked to determine the progress in relation to the goals. Next create a simple reporting interface, then comes your dashboard and now you can run your business.

Start the above as early as you can and as early as makes sense, not 90 days after launch when the board questions your progress only to scramble and throw the office into chaos mode.

In my past 10 years of online start-up experience I have seen too many start-ups spend 90% of their time on development and features only to later realize that they need revenue and reporting on metrics to evaluate their business progress.

Take the time to evaluate your business metrics and design them into your site as well as create the necessary reporting to gauge progress.

Ooh yeah and don’t forget revenue ;-)