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…

The Positives of Being Negative

We are excited to announce that we just launched our patent-pending Negative Keyword Recommendation Engine as part of both the Yield Web Marketing Suite and Yield Web Marketing Suite for Agencies. This new feature is now available to all new and existing customers.

The Negative Keyword Recommendation Engine analyzes volumes of your historical traffic segmented by keyword, ad group and campaign. It then aggregates data based on common terms and uses sophisticated algorithms based on a variety of criteria including search volume, bounce rate and conversion rate to automatically recommend negative keywords for addition to each of your campaigns and ad groups.

While there are many facets of a search marketing campaign that are critical for success, many search engine marketers forget to pay enough attention to one of the most important aspects of their campaign. You launch your…

We’re Big Fans of Agencies…

…Which is Why We’re in New York

Even though we are headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley, we are making our first trip east to exhibit at ad:tech New York 2009, with very good reason. The nightlife? The food? The fashion? While New York certainly has a lot to offer–the three months I lived there, I think I slept for about 2 hours total–it is also one of the epicenters of advertising activity. Sure, Madison Avenue is renowned. However, in this digital media age, there are tons of interactive agencies successfully helping advertisers get online and leverage search engine marketing to attract and acquire customers.

So, what could be a better location to launch our agency offering, the Yield Web Marketing Suite for Agencies. We’ve been working on this product for over a year, ensuring that…

Is Pay Per Click Right For You?

Addressing Common Concerns

At Yield Software, we have the luxury of seeing a multitude of businesses across a wide range of industries, geographies, business models, etc. This give us a unique perspective on internet marketing effectiveness for different types of businesses. A question I hear often is: “For my type of business, is search engine marketing relevant?” While it’s not safe to over-generalize, I’ve put some thoughts together that can help you decide how relevant pay-per-click is for your business.

The benefits are well known and documented–search marketing has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry because it is effective and measurable. Combining the fact that a disproportionate share of marketing budgets are targeted to the Internet relative to the amount of time users spend on the it, together with the ability to assess exactly how valuable each…

Which Is Harder? Google Analytics or Rubik’s Cube?

Understanding the Cost of “Free”

Let’s face it: It is great that Google offers a free analytics tool that tracks all your traffic and allows you to slice-it and dice-it by a variety of different dimensions. You can have a tremendous amount of insight into how your website is performing, where your traffic is coming from, which content is most effective, what users are doing when they get to your site and more.

However, on the downside, in the “Information Rights and Publicity” section of Google’s Terms of Service, they have the right to use the data internally as they see fit. (Insert “crickets chirping in the woods” soundtrack.)  On top of that, you need to be able to really understand all the data you’re presented with, and have the time to analyze and understand it properly.

So,…

Making Sense of Facebook Referrers

…and Tips for Better Tracking

More and more of our clients ask for advice regarding how best to use Facebook as an effective means for driving more traffic to their websites.  This is increasingly important as recognized by comScore who recently reported that about one of every five Internet display ads in the United States is viewed on a social networking Web site like MySpace and Facebook. While our Yield Web Marketing Suite doesn’t include a Facebook module (yet!), we don’t hesitate recommending its use as part of an overall Web marketing strategy.

Simply put, Facebook is an excellent source of traffic for your web site. There are a variety of ways you can attract traffic:

1. Post a link on your wall
2. Post a link on someone else’s wall (make sure it is relevant!)
3. Create a fan page…

Microsoft & Yahoo: Live Together or Die Alone

Our Analysis of the Deal, Potential Impacts

The day has finally arrived.  Microsoft and Yahoo have figured out how to partner together.  And, it was all done under the unparalleled scrutiny of incessant press and blogger coverage.  Congratulations to Steve Ballmer and Carol Bartz.  You get an A+ for persistence.

There are a lot of purists and contrarians criticizing Yahoo for entering into this agreement, most of which presumes a loss of entrepreneurship, innovation and competitive advantage.  However, let’s set the story straight.  Yahoo has been struggling in the search marketplace for quite some time.  They have seen their market share erode and have not shown any signs of turning that around.  Google, through their simple user interface and continuous innovation, has claimed the search marketplace as its own.

What options were left for Yahoo?  Dethroning the market…

New Upgrades Live

Our product and engineering teams are constantly at work processing feedback from our customers to improve our Yield Web Marketing Suite. Our goal is to make your user experience increasingly simple, easy-to-use and, yet, increasingly powerful.

We just published a range of enhancements that we know our users will appreciate and that we anticipate new comers will definitely want to check out. Again, all of these enhancements were driven by feedback from you, which we deeply appreciate hearing. Keep them coming! Here’s just a few highlights:

First, we’ve improved the user interface, adding new colors and graphics to make the interface even more appealing and intuitive. We’ve also added a couple of new widgets to the Dashboard to improve the at-a-glance information available to you, including a new “What’s Yield done for me in the last 24…

Google Unleashes a New Wave

As you may have heard, Google announced their next big product offering at the Google I|O Conference, called Google Wave.  Even if you aren’t a technologist, you’d have to concede that what they built is pretty amazing.

What is Google Wave?

Their primary positioning is that is the next generation of email.  In short, email on steroids.  It allows you to edit in the middle of a wave (the new name for an email).  It allows you to replay how a wave was created, much like a Tivo.  It allows you to see when someone is updating a wave, in real-time!  It allows you to jointly collaborate with recipients on a wave simultaneously.  It allows you to do real-time, letter-for-letter instant messaging with live bi-directional language translation, among many other features.  In short, some pretty cool stuff.

In addition,…

Extending Our Team: World Class Advisors

Building successful companies isn’t just about building great products, though that’s critically important.   There are many ingredients that enable companies to reach their full potential.  And, most of the ingredients start out with finding great people.  When my co-founder and I started Yield Software, we tasked ourselves with finding the most talented professionals in the software and marketing arenas.  We took the philosophy that quality will always win out over quantity.  Over the last three years, we’ve assembled a remarkable team that I’m extremely proud of.

It is also vitally important that a company identify and work with key individuals in their industry to accelerate the success of the company, especially in competitive segments.  These individuals, while not employees of the company, can provide the guidance, counsel and connections to enable your company to grow rapidly…