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.

Our awesome engineering team is constantly releasing upgrades and fixes to our Web-based Yield Web Marketing Suite and this last round, released on Friday, had some pretty great new feature upgrades.

First and foremost, our Power Editing feature was upgraded to include a terrific new graphing function that enables you to visually evaluate the performance of campaigns, or ads or individual keywords for any given period of time.  And because Power Editing allows you to change ads (i.e., change the URL copy for multiple ads at once) without deleting or disabling them, you’re able to see campaign performance prior to a change and after.  For those importing a campaign from Google to our system for the first time, our system will also import your history so you’ll be able to see a graphic display of your campaign’s performance.

What’s so great about this, I think, is that when looking a rows and rows of numbers, it can be difficult to see the forest for the trees.  But when visualized, that same data is brought into more specific relief, revealing trends and performance that can be instructive when making choices for how best to optimize your campaigns for Google and Bing/Yahoo.

There’s one other cool piece of news: our application is now optimized for iPads and other devices that don’t recognize Flash.  You can now monitor and manage your search marketing campaigns on the go using any number of mobile devices and tablets.  Here’s a screenshot of our upgraded Power Editing feature with the graphing function as seen on an iPad:

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.

Jamie O’Donnell of SEO-PR interviews Matt Malden, CEO of Yield Software and an exhibitor at last month’s SES San Francisco 2010.  Here’s a synopsys of Jamie’s reporting:

Yield Software’s Yield Web Marketing Suite handles three aspects of automated web marketing. It has a pay-per-click (PPC) bid management module that includes spending on the three major search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo.  Second, the Yield Web Marketing Suite offers automated SEO or natural search engine optimization. Using the Yield Web Marketing Suite, Web marketers can get higher organic search rankings for their important keywords and learn how to improve their landing pages, link building, on-page and off-page optimization. Finally, the Yield Web Marketing Suite offers Web marketers a landing page optimization module. Using Yield, marketers can conduct complex multivariate testing of landing pages, using a visual drag and drop interface to automatically implement recommendations.

Yield Software is great for advertisers who want to be more effective in the search space, particularly medium and large-sized companies. Yield Software has also been adopted by digital and interactive media agencies that are conducting bid management, natural search optimization and email campaigns in order to help them generate better search marketing results.

Yield Software empowers any organization in the world to attract high-value customers at the lowest cost. Using advanced algorithms and techniques, the Yield Web Marketing Suite optimizes internet marketing expenditures, attracts visitors to a web site and tunes web page content to have the greatest impact.

For more information about exhibiting at SES, please visit: http://searchenginestrategies.com

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.

Stop by Our Booth on the Expo Floor!

Yield Software will be presenting and exhibiting at SES-San Francisco 2010 next week at Moscone West.  Our booth number is 416 — Matt, Jenae, Jacob and I will be hanging out there doing demos and schmoozing, and we’d love to say hello if you’re there.

If you’re not already registered for SES, you can still get a free exhibit hall pass — just visit Search Engine Strategies San Francisco to reserve a pass.  We’re also going to be giving away a free Apple iPad (a $499 value) from business cards dropped into the fishbowl at our booth, so be sure to bring yours along and drop it into the bowl.  We’ll do the drawing at the end of the conference and ship the winner’s new iPad directly from Apple.

One more thing to keep in mind: we’ve got a SES promotion you might want to check out.  It’s called our GET SMART promo and here’s how it works:

Sign up for a Yield Web Marketing Suite account for Advertisers or for Agencies before September 15, 2010 and we will include a complimentary “Smart Start” JumpStart worth more than $500.  Your Smart Start will include: Account Set-up; a PPC JumpStart for a single campaign; and 60 days of campaign optimization by one of our PPC experts from our Professional Services team. After 60 days, you’ll be able to take over management of your campaign with ease.

Even if you’re not able to join us at SES next week, do take advantage of the Smart Start JumpStart if you don’t already subscribe to the Yield Web Marketing Suite.  It’s a great way to get off to a solid start managing your SEM campaigns more efficiently, more effectively and more profitably.

SEMPO-San Francisco Bay Area Working Group Party

Join the SEMPO San Francisco Working Group at the post-SES Conference Party on Wednesday, August 18^th.   The hour-long social mixer and networking event will be held in Room 2001 of the Moscone West building in downtown San Francisco, and will begin shortly after the day’s final learning session.  Come join the post-seminar celebration fun and capitalize on an opportunity to meet industry professionals and learn about the latest trends in the world of search.

What’s in it for you?

Complimentary food and drinks (thanks to YouTube and Google)

An opportunity to expand your Search Engine Marketing industry professionals network

An opportunity to learn more about the local SEMPO organization and provide insight for our next event in September covering Trends in Social Media Marketing

For more information, please stop by the SEMPO San Francisco booth in SES-San Francisco Expo Hall on Tuesday August 17^th or Wednesday August 18^th.  Or simply stop by room 2001 at 6:30pm and join the fun and networking!  Also, be sure to join the SEMPO San Francisco conversation and follow us on Facebook and Linked In.

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.

What to Read When You Put Down Those Stieg Larsson Novels

It’s summer and I understand everywhere else in the United States, it’s hot.  In San Francisco, we’ve endured day after day of thick fog (during my run through Golden Gate Park the other day, I swear it was snowing) so I can only imagine what it’s like to lay in a backyard hammock reading great books (now, on my iPad) while sipping ice cold lemonaid.

Recently, I was at a meeting where the group I was addressing asked what blogs and websites I regularly read to stay on top of trends in search and social marketing.  It occurred to me that it might be fun to list them in this column, together with some great career-oriented reading.

Every morning, when I fire up my laptop upon arriving at work, I first read the newsletters from MediaPost.  I subscribe to Media Daily News, Search Marketing Daily, Social Media & Marketing Daily, and Mobile Marketing Daily – each of which is a delivered via email.  I like these because MediaPost does a great job of leveraging my peers and the investigative reporting of its bloggers to keep me abreast of breaking and trending news in my industry. (I’m also a regular columnist for Search Marketing Daily, so there’s that, too…)

In the realm of general marketing and advertising, I’m a huge fan of 5BlogsBeforeLunch by David Ibsen.  He does a great job rounding up the big news of the day and bringing his own insightful (and often wryly funny) point of view.  I also love the Marketing Pilgrim by Andy Beal, which is more generally focused on search and social marketing, but increasingly includes news from across the marketing industry.  I also regularly read The New York Times Media & Advertising section and the daily blog posts in AdAge Digital.  Finally, I regularly read the Forrester Marketing & Strategy Blog.

In the world of search marketing, I read what you might expect: Search Engine Land (Danny Sullivan is still the top dog in all things search, in my opinion); Search Engine Watch; Matt Cutts’ Blog; the AdCenter Search Blog; the Y! Search Blog; and the Google’s Inside AdWords Blog.

If you’re on the geeky side (or are finally ready to show some ROI on your marketing programs), read the blog Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik, which focuses on Web analytics.  While you’re at it, read his book “Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability & Science of Customer Centricity.”

In terms of more general Web 2.0 stuff, I still love Seth Godin’s missives.  His newish book is a great read if you haven’t read it already (“Linchpin” available here.)  Amber Naslund, in addition to being the Director of Community at Radian6, is a terrific blogger and has one of the better Twitter handles in the biz: @ambercadabra.  (If you’re looking for another good Twitter handle to follow, check out Jeremiah Owyang.)  Also, I still read John Battelle’s blog, which I started reading years ago while I was at Technorati (it’s served me well!)  And 37 Signals’ Signal vs. Noise Blog is educational (and very often entertaining.)  Finally, I really like Brian Solis’s informative and thought-provoking blog.  He’s also got a new book out called “Engage!”, which I really encourage you to read.

Another book worth picking up for a summertime read (once you’ve burned through all those red-hot Stieg Larsson novels) is Charlene Li’s new book “Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead”.  Also, you should pre-order the book by my MediaPost colleague, Aaron Goldman (“Everything I Know About Marketing I Learned from Google”), which comes out in August.

A reader of mine over at MediaPost just recommended “The Big Short” by Michael Lewis (he was featured on NPR, “60 Minutes” on CBS and reviewed in The New York Times.  I’m not too sure how dissecting the stock market machinations leading to the Great Recession will go with a hammock and a an ice-cold lemonaid, but nothing ventured…  I hope you’re having a great summer!