New Reports Feature Live

Now Available: Export via PDF and Excel

Thanks to an awesome and constantly responsive engineering team, we’ve added a feature our customers have been asking for a lot lately: report exports via PDF and Excel.  Now, when you’re in “Reports” view, you have three options for taking your performance data with you: Print, PDF and Excel. For me, the new Excel export feature is the best because (obviously) you now have the flexibility to work with your data and present it in whatever ways you might require.  As always, if you have any questions or issues, don’t hesitate to contact support.

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System Maintenance Window on Saturday, February 27, 2010

Yield Software will perform routine systems maintenance on Saturday, February 27 beginning at 9 a.m. PST and ending at 5 p.m. PST.  During this time, all campaigns will continue to operate normally and there is no need to adjust or make changes to live campaigns before or after the maintenance window.  Users of the Yield Web Marketing Suite and Natural Search Optimizer, however, will not be able to access their accounts during this maintenance window.  If you have questions or concerns, please call 1-877-943-5379 or email support[at]yieldsoftware[dot]com.

Step by Step Guide to Building a Great PPC Keyword List

A Four-Step Process to Get You on Your Way

A great pay-per-click (PPC) keyword strategy is central to any campaign’s success, so getting your list right is absolutely critical. Once your campaign is live, the Yield Web Marketing Suite works every day to make recommendations to you about new keywords you might consider together with negative keyword recommendations. This guide, then, will help you create a great keyword list in advance of launching a new campaign in four easy steps: 1) Questions; 2) Keyword Tools; 3) Variations; and 4) Assembly.

1) Questions.

Use the following question categories to start making your list. As you go through and answer these questions, keep your thoughts organized into the different buckets – we’ll keep using these categories in future steps. Throughout this guide we’ll use an example of a restaurant for…

Want to Improve Page Rank? Try Ritual Sacrifice

DILBERT by Scott Adams

Microhoo Clears Regulatory Hurdles

Combined Bing-Yahoo! Search Partnership Live by December

It certainly took a little time.  But all the bureaucratic issues have been resolved.  Microsoft and Yahoo! have now received regulatory clearance to form the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance in the United States and European Union.  What this means, essentially, is that Microsoft’s Bing search engine results will combine in some form with Yahoo’s, and the pay-per-click advertising platform for both engines will be powered by Microsoft’s adCenter.

Though Yahoo’s spin on what comes next seems slightly different from Microsoft’s, there is some agreement on the fundamentals.

According to the official Microsoft announcement, after the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is implemented, you will:

Reach more potential customers. Search ad inventory from both the Yahoo! and Microsoft networks will be joined in a new, unified search marketplace powered by Bing, with a combined audience of over…

When Your Conversion Rate Plummets

Twelve Diagnostic Questions to Get Answers

We frequently get inquiries from businesses that were getting a healthy amount of leads and conversions, but then suddenly their conversion rate takes a nose dive. When the phone stops ringing in today’s economy, panic ensues.

Many businesses aren’t even aware of all the different factors which can cause a negative change like this to occur. In order to give you a hand, we put together this list of questions to ask yourself to get to the root of the problem.

We’ll start at the “front” of the line with our problem-solving and work our way back to the landing page and website, since front-line changes are much easier to address.

1. Have the paid search keywords that are getting clicks changed?

Check out your pay per click (PPC) advertising keywords bringing in traffic.…

Aardvark, an Awesome Wave and a Good Buzz

Google’s Social Revolution

Last week’s announcement of Google’s (relatively small) acquisition of Aardvark, the real-time social Q&A start-up, received a fair amount of buzz.  Which was on top of the abundant buzz generated by Google’s release of Google Buzz.  Which, of course, follows last year’s buzz about Google Wave.

Though Wave, a social collaboration tool, is kind of uber-geeky and not particularly intuitive, Google Buzz draws on a now well-known metaphor: the news feed.  And while it has generated some early heat around privacy issues, Google Buzz (in its most current form – they’ve been updating it nearly daily in response to user reactions) draws on your Gmail and chat contacts to form an instant social graph.  That graph enables you to stay connected with your contacts in much the same way you would via Facebook or Twitter (or, more accurately, FriendFeed before…

Seven Steps to Get Your Website Caffeinated

Preparing for Google Caffeine

In 2010, Google’s search results are becoming more focused on results that are fast, fresh and visual.   Now is your chance to get your website ready to make sure you are part of Google’s first page crowd in 2010.

1) Are You Fast?

Google is going to judge you based on how fast your web pages load.  You should aim to have your page load in 3 seconds or less.

If you are clocking in at over 3 seconds you might try some of the following techniques (which your web master or website designer can help you with):  use CSS; limit the amount of Flash on the site; use image heights and widths; check for broken links; compress your JavaScript and CSS; cut back on cookies; review server or hosting provider performance; and remove…

Social Media Marketing Part 3: Industry Examples

Outline a Strategy and an Objective

In our first post in this series, we discussed the underlying basics of social media marketing.  And in the second post, we covered the avenues you should use when executing a social media marketing strategy.  In this, our third and final post in this series, let’s go through a couple of examples to help spark some more ideas. What follows is a few sample business types with a list of items for them to tweet, post, blog and provide guides and tools about, while also encouraging community comments, photos and participation.

As you’ll see from the examples below, it would be easy to apply these suggestion to virtually any business (particularly any consumer-oriented business), so use your imagination and insert your own company into the examples that follow:

Real Estate Social Marketing

Be the…

WATCH THIS: Introducing the Free SEO Analyzer and More

New Natural Search Optimization Products Debut

How do we start a new year at Yield Software? While marketers and advertisers were wrapping up 2009 focused on a critical holiday shopping season, things were very different at Yield Software. We were working diligently to finish development on two exciting new product offerings that we are proud to launch today.

The first is the Yield SEO Analyzer. This is a FREE product that enables you to quickly and easily tune your pages for attracting more natural search traffic. Every website owner wants to acquire more traffic and what could be better than more, free traffic! The Yield SEO Analyzer tests your page against a library of best practices and tells you in a very easy-to-understand way what you can do to rank higher in the organic section of the…