The enhancements include:

Content Network Support – Create and launch campaigns on the Google and Bing content networks so your text ads can appear on third-party websites

Display Network Support – Create and launch campaigns that leveraging graphical (also known as “display” or “banner”) advertising on the Google Display Network

Mobile Network Support – Target mobile users by creating and launching mobile advertising campaigns on the Google Mobile and Bing Mobile Networks



Multiple Ad Creation Wizard – Easily create multiple versions of your search, content, display and/or mobile advertising with real-time ad validation

Ad Cloning – Easily create copies of your existing ads and even versions of those ads targeted for different publishers and network types (e.g. display, mobile, etc.)

Improved Bid Optimization – We have continued to make significant advances in our bid optimization technology to deliver even better results for your online advertising campaigns.

Improved SEO Inbound Link Analysis – Our link analyzer has been enhanced to more accurately track inbound links and benchmark your link building performance comparatively against other websites

Scheduling Standard Reports – You can now schedule the Natural Search Report, Paid Search Report and Landing Page Optimization reports to be automatically run and emailed to you on a weekly or monthly basis.

Improved Power Editing – We have exposed more statistics for you to view and now all the statistics can be searched and sorted

Real-Time Task Monitoring – You can now view and track the status of campaign imports and custom report processes as well as receive real-time notifications when these tasks complete

We hope you enjoy them and as always, if you have any questions, feedback or issues, please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@yieldsoftware.com.

As our customer base has grown from mainly smaller business to larger and more complex enterprises and agencies who conduct equally complex search marketing campaigns, the team here at Yield Software responded with the creation of two new features, which I think you’ll love instantly: Power Editing and Custom Reporting.  Now, those who manage more sophisticated search marketing campaigns are able to leverage the many features and options already available to them in the Yield Web Marketing Suite, but with even greater speed and efficiency.

Power Editing is a new part of the Paid Search Optimizer module in the Yield Web Marketing Suite.  It enables managers of PPC campaigns to quickly and efficiently establish and then edit very large, complex campaigns of up to thousands of ad groups, with multiple ads in each group targeting many thousands of keywords or more across Google, Yahoo and Bing.

New Custom Reporting expands on the already robust tracking and reporting infrastructure in the Yield Web Marketing Suite.  Search engine marketers can now customize reports to display exactly the data and analytics they need to be successful in every aspect of their search marketing and search engine optimization efforts.

Yield Software Custom Reporting enables users of the Yield Web Marketing Suite to design reports; save those report definitions;  share reports; generate reports; and schedule reports to be delivered via email on a periodic basis.  I know many of our agency customers, in particular, have been anxiously awaiting this new feature and I look forward to hearing how you like it.

If you have any questions about these new features or would like to see a demonstration of how to put them to best use, don’t hesitate to contact a customer success rep either at support[at]yieldsoftware[dot]com or 1-877-943-5379.

Yield Web Marketing Suite First PPC Optimization Suite to Join AppExchange

I’m very excited to announce today that we’ve completed the integration of our flagship Yield Web Marketing Suite with Salesforce.com.  This was a big effort by the Yield Software team and responds directly to the needs of our customers who use Salesforce.com for their sales and marketing CRM.  The Yield Web Marketing Suite is now available on AppExchange, the cloud computing marketplace at Salesforce.com.

Any marketer currently managing multichannel marketing campaigns using Salesforce.com can now add a complete suite of search marketing capabilities to their mix.  The Yield Web Marketing Suite enables any advertiser or their agency to efficiently launch and manage comprehensive search marketing campaigns, complete with integrated reporting, while reaping the benefits of lower costs of acquisition, improved conversion rates and increased profitability.

Features of the Yield Web Marketing Suite include:

Paid Search Optimizer. Launch, manage and optimize pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns across Google, Yahoo! and Bing, based on sophisticated bid management algorithms that work to ensure your campaigns attract the best traffic at the lowest possible cost.

Natural Search Optimizer. Ensure your website pages are optimized for your most important keywords in order to achieve the highest possible natural search rank.  Track inbound links, page rank by keywords and the health of your site at any time interval you choose.

Landing Page Optimizer. Set up multivariate tests of landing pages quickly and easily.  Determine which version of a landing page best converts visitors to improve search marketing campaign performance and profitability.

Salesforce.com Integration. Launch, manage and optimize search marketing campaigns alongside other marketing initiatives in a unified Salesforce.com dashboard.  Improve the performance of pay-per-click campaigns, keywords, ads and landing pages to most effectively drive sales and revenue.

We look forward to serving our customers who are also part of the Salesforce.com ecosystem. As always, if you have any questions or suggestions or issues, please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@yieldsoftware.com or via 1-877-943-5379.

We’ve been busy at Yield Software — this is the second big announcement in as many weeks, and there’s more to come — and today’s announcement is going to make a lot of businesses happy. Today we released the newest version of our flagship offering, which we’re calling Yield Web Marketing Suite Lite. It’s a completely free version focused just on PPC campaign management for smaller budgets.

Advertisers continue to shift from more traditional advertising channels, such as direct mail, spot cable, radio, and print ads, to online marketing channels, especially search engine marketing (SEM). However, many are unsuccessful in their SEM efforts and fail to generate the desired returns from their marketing campaigns.

Search engine marketing is a competitive and dynamic marketplace. Manually managing SEM campaigns requires significant domain knowledge and expertise, including understanding bid and competitive dynamics, keyword selection, geo-targeting, conversion tracking, traffic analytics and many other factors.

The Yield Web Marketing Suite automates SEM campaigns using our proprietary bid optimization algorithm, enabling businesses to better compete in PPC advertising. With the introduction of Yield Web Marketing Suite Lite, it’s now also the only algorithmically-driven bid management solution that optimizes campaigns across all three major search engines simultaneously and is completely free. Advertisers can manage up to $500 per month in PPC advertising at no charge. For those who choose to increase their monthly ad budgets or who wish to also use the other two modules in the Yield Web Marketing Suite (Natural Search Optimizer and Landing Page Optimizer) can simply upgrade to our standard system.  Together with our free SEO Analyzer, companies operating under tight marketing budgets now have two important tools to better their web marketing performance at no cost to them.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

This morning we officially announced the availability of a new call tracking feature in our Yield Web Marketing Suite for Advertisers and for Agencies through an integration with Marchex Call Analytics.  This is a feature many of our users have been eagerly awaiting so we’re pretty excited to announce that it’s live for all users.  For those who don’t know about Marchex, what this means is search marketers and their agencies can now track and optimize sales and conversions from search engine pay-per-click (PPC) ads or natural search results that lead to a telephone call as opposed to an online transaction.

For many of our users, a call to a telephone number is the conversion event inspired by their search engine ad or natural search result.  By integrating with Marchex, the leader in call analytics, search marketing professionals or their agencies managing campaigns in the Yield Web Marketing Suite are now able to effectively track and evaluate the efficacy of their search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns with a call conversion event.  Many of you have told us the reason your company or agency clients love PPC advertising is the ability to effectively track ROI on campaigns, but, of course, those who’ve relied on telephone calls as the conversion event have often been frustrated at the inability to attribute those calls to the advertising source.  The Yield Software–Marchex integration eliminates this ROI tracking gap in SEM.

One of our customers, Michael Cody at Directory Assistants, Inc., was a beta-tester of the new feature and here’s the feedback he gave me:

“As specialists in search and directional marketing for small and mid-size businesses, a disproportionate number of our clients rely on calls as their conversion event for PPC advertising.  Now we’re able to effectively manage PPC campaigns across Google, Yahoo! and Bing search engines on behalf of our clients while accurately attributing each conversion – no matter how those might occur – to the right campaign source.”

We’ve also included built-in reporting tools and analyses in the Yield Web Marketing Suite, so both our advertiser and agency customers now have greater visibility into the impact of your marketing initiatives, which means you can more effectively leverage SEM as a key component of your larger marketing mix.

For current subscribers to the Yield Web Marketing Suite, simply:

Login.

Click on either the Paid Search Optimizer tab.

In the Paid Search Optimizer module, click into an existing campaign or set up a new campaign.

Under “Quick Links” in the right-hand column, click on “Set Up Conversion Events”.

In the Conversion Events page, scroll down to the “Marchex Conversion Events” section and click on “Create a Marchex Conversion Event” link.

Follow the simple instructions; once your conversion event is set up, you’ll be able to track all your call conversion events in the Reports tab, along side all your other conversion event tracking data.

As always, our customer success reps are available to help you out if you questions or require assistance.  Let us know what you think of this new feature–we built it for you and hope you get great results from it.

A Top 100 Private Technology Firm Driving the Future of Technology

Last night, I was honored to pick up an award at the annual Red Herring North America Conference in San Diego recognizing Yield Software as a Red Herring North America 100 leader in technology innovation. We’re very proud, of course, and while I got the fun job of accepting the award, it’s really a recognition of the extraordinary work of our product and engineering teams, and the faith and support of our investors.

What’s great about this award is the rigor applied to the way in which recipients are selected. Consider this from Alex Vieux, who is the publisher and CEO of Red Herring:

“This year was especially difficult. Despite the global economic situation, there were many great companies producing really innovative and amazing products that we had a difficult time narrowing the pool and selecting the finalists. We know that this year’s crop will grow into some amazing companies that are sure to go far.”

Winners for the 2010 edition of the Red Herring 100 North America award were selected based upon their technological innovation, management strength, market size, investor record, customer acquisition, and financial health. During the several months leading up to the announcement, hundreds of companies in the telecommunications, security, Web 2.0, software, hardware, biotech, and clean tech industries sent in their submissions to qualify for the award.

All of which is to say we’re very proud to have been selected as one of the 100 given so much competition and evaluative rigor. Thanks to all our customers whose feedback and use of our Yield Web Marketing Suite ensures we keep getting better and better. I look forward to more good things to come!

Well, now you can set up users to have complete access to the application without the ability to change or update anything. We call this feature Read-Only User Roles. To access this feature, you need to be an account or agency owner.

If you are an advertiser, just go to the “My Account” page. In the Access List, you can see the role for each user at your company as well as the access role (Owner, User, Monitor) that he/she has. To set up a user with read-only access, select the Monitor role. You can also change the access of an existing user by selecting the Edit action.

For Agencies, you can choose to add a read-only user to all client sites or an individual client site. To add a read-only user to an individual client site, go to the Client Dashboard and select “Manage Users” for the desired client site. To add a read-only user to all client sites, go the “My Agency” page and use the Access List. In either case, you can see the role for each user and can add/edit users as described above.

Good luck with your read-only users and keep the great product suggestions coming!

Are you the search marketer with campaigns running successfully for some time and know exactly what search queries you want your ads to show for? Or, are you open to experimenting with different search queries to see if you stumble upon an untapped goldmine of query inventory?

The feature we are talking about is called Match Type, which the search engines use to allow you to control how narrowly or broadly to match queries with your keywords.

You can bid on keywords using an exact match match type to ensure that your ads show only for queries that match your keywords verbatim. You can also bid on keywords using an broad match match type, which uses the search engine’s matching logic to identify searches on synonyms, concepts, etc. that broadly match your keyword. Or, you can take the middle ground and bid using a phrase match match type to ensure that your keyword exists in the search term but may be accompanied by other words.

For most campaigns, the Yield Web Marketing Suite automatically bids and evaluates all three match types (subject to limitations on each search engine) for each keyword.

However, for those of you who asked for more control, you now have it! You can now access the Match Type Expansion setting available on the Advanced Campaign Settings page:

You can indicate whether you want the system to bid on exact match; exact and phrase match; or exact, phrase and broad match (the default). You can override this setting on a keyword-by-keyword basis by going to the Edit Keyword Detail page and changing the Match Type setting from Automatic to the specific match type you desire. The keywords set to Automatic will use the Match Type Expansion setting and for keywords with specific Match Types specified the system will only bid on those match types.

Hope you like and it and happy matching!

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 search engine results pages. This is a great first step to show you the power and benefits of spending your energy on search engine optimization (SEO).

The second product is the Yield Natural Search Optimizer. For marketers who want to further increase the amount of natural search traffic they drive to their website, the Yield Natural Search Optimizer is the ideal solution. It includes all the functionality of the Yield SEO Analyzer, plus it includes additional SEO best practices testing, inbound link tracking, natural search rank trending and a comprehensive array of natural search analytics. All these capabilities make the Yield Natural Search Optimizer the ideal product to continually monitor, tune and improve your natural search rank to increase the traffic to your website.

So, if you are new to search engine optimization or want to see how well your pages are optimized, the Yield SEO Analyzer is a great place to start. On the other hand, if you already understand the tremendous benefits of search engine optimization, check out the Yield Natural Search Optimizer. And, if you are interested in a complete web marketing suite to optimize your sites natural search, paid search and landing pages, you will find that the Yield Web Marketing Suite is the perfect solution to meet your needs.

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 campaign by setting up keywords, groups and ad copy. However, you’ll inevitably discover that you want to spend your marketing budget even more effectively.

This is where “negative keywords” come into play. In short, negative keywords (also called “excluded keywords”) prevent your ads from showing when the search query includes one or more keywords that you have specified you want to exclude. For example, if you are a realtor and have a phrase match for “real estate agent”, you may attract searches looking for “real estate agent classes”. By adding “classes” as a negative keyword, you will ensure your ads are not shown for people looking for classes on becoming a real estate agent. By narrowing your focus of your advertisements, you will ensure that you wouldn’t be paying for clicks from people not interested in your offering. In addition, you will improve your quality score and, as a result, lower your cost per click by improving the relevancy of your ads.

You may ask, “Why wouldn’t I want to pay for any click I can get? After all, if the user wasn’t interested in what I was advertising, they wouldn’t click on it!” The answer is that people may click on your ad for a variety of reasons. They may not read your ad correctly, read it in the wrong context, or not even read it at all before clicking on it. Typically, they will realize they are in the wrong destination and immediately leave — which is called a bounce. In other words, you paid for the click and they weren’t remotely interested in what you were offering.

You can access negative keyword recommendations by navigating to your paid search campaign and clicking “Manage Negative Keywords” or clicking on any ad group to see the group detail. The pages displayed will show both your currently selected negative keywords and any negative keyword recommendations (note: we will only recommend negative keywords when you have enough traffic for us to make relevant recommendations).

By using the Yield Software Negative Keyword Recommendation Engine, you can be sure you are continuously tuning your campaign to eliminate targeting irrelevant traffic, improve the effectiveness of your search marketing budget and increase the ROI of your campaigns. (Who knew being so negative could produce such positive results?)