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:

So if your company is in Australia, you will probably rank higher there, and now you can prove it (see both screen shots below). From our “natural search” tab, choose one of your SEO pages. In the keywords section, select “Live Results”. Then select the Country from the SERP preview and we’ll display the results, show you the rank of your page in the results, and highlight other pages in your domain if they appear in the results. It is after all a worldwide Web.

USA SERP

Australia SERP

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!

Thanks to customer feedback and suggestions, you will now see two improvements.  First, we have updated our cross-search engine budget allocation algorithm to consider additional statistics including click-through-rate (CTR) and stay rate. As a result, you will see a more optimal allocation of spend across search engines. All existing and new campaigns will automatically leverage this enhancement as they will be set to Automatic Budget Allocation in the Advanced Campaign Settings page.

Second, for those of you wishing to have more control, we have introduced Manual Budget Allocation, which gives you the ability to explicitly set your spend for each search engine in any campaign with this beautiful piece of GUI goodness:

Campaign Settings showing Manual Budget Allocation

This combination of settings of new features provides you maximum flexibility in achieving your targeted spend across search engines.  Keep the feedback coming — we really appreciate it — and enjoy the new features.

(That Would Be: Link Analysis Made Easy)

Yield Software is proud to introduce Link Analysis Made Easy (LAME).

I know, I know: you’re thinking “is that really the best way to brand your new technology??” But rest assured: LAME is so NOT lame.

LAME makes it much easier to determine which of your inbound links are passing the all-important “Link Juice” to your web pages.  Let’s step back though.  What is Link Juice? Link Juice (we also call it link love) is the concept that a link to your Web page from a quality web page on a trusted site can pass some of its goodness to your Web page.  Why are inbound links important?  Inbound links are the key to raising your natural search rank because Google, Yahoo! and Bing each look at links to your site to judge how popular it is and, therefore, what sort of ranking it should get in results pages.  Links from quality sites (i.e. NYTimes.com) have more juice than links from inconsequential sites (i.e., YourNeighborsTotallyOutOfDateBlog.com), so the more high-quality links to your site, the higher your ranking in search engine results.

But how do you know which links to your page are helping you the most?  You could go to Yahoo! Site Explorer and do a search for inbound links to the page.  Then you could navigate to each of those pages and make a note of their Google PageRank using the Google toolbar add-on for Firefox.  And then you could View Source to find your link in the raw HTML and pull out the Anchor Text.  You could also make note of whether that link has a “NoFollow” attribute.  Then count the outbound links on the page to see how many links are competing for link juice.  But doing all that is exhausting!

Is there a better way?  Of course there is, and it is LAME.

For a given Web page on your site, Yield Software’s LAME technology will take periodic snapshots of the inbound links to that page, and will track which links are new or retired.  Actually, we’ve had that functionality for a while.  What’s new is that the “Link Juice” column shows you which links we think are passing you “Link Juice” based a series of analyses.

The actual algorithms used by the search engines to calculate link value are well-guarded secrets, but there is widespread agreement in the SEO community on certain key factors in the link value calculation.  We’ve created several analyses that we use on each in-bound link.  You can see the results in the “Details” page.

Using the information that we’ve gathered about your link, we perform analyses to see how much potential Link Juice the link has, and what factors are helping or hindering its value.

So why should you care about all this?  If you want to begin impacting your page rank for each of your most important keywords, you now have an efficient way to see where you’re at today, and the sorts of improvements you’re able to generate through a sustained link-building campaign.  Now that you have an easy way to gauge link value, you are ready to start link building!  For tips and strategies around executing a good link-building campaign, check out our many blog posts on SEO and building in-bound links.

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.

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?)

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 it not only allows our agency customers to easily manage paid search campaigns on behalf of their clients, it allows them to also expand their services to include search engine optimization (SEO) and landing page optimization (LPO). And, all these capabilities are integrated into one easy-to-use system, reducing training costs and improving the effectiveness of agency staffers. This new offering leverages many of the capabilities of our charter product, but it also includes an integrated client dashboard, agency reporting, automated client on-boarding, agency co-branding and a number of other features.

We architected this product in response to great feedback from our agency clients and built an offering that more closely meets their specific needs. They asked for a solution that allowed them to serve more clients with more capabilities while generating better results. We definitely delivered. For agencies interested in learning more, either drop by our ad:tech booth (#1515) or send us an email at sales@yieldsoftware.com and we’d be happy to give you a personalized demonstration.

As we were hearing great input from our agency customers, many of our business customers commented that they find the Yield Web Marketing Suite valuable, but have zero bandwidth to even get started. As a result, we are simultaneously announcing the launch of a series of service offerings to enable businesses to get a one-time JumpStart to begin taking advantage of the automated capabilities of our product; or leverage our Managed Services Experts for ongoing management of campaigns set up on the Yield Web Marketing Suite.

So, whether you’re an agency or a business, looking for a self-service application or a consultative partner, we have just the right solution for you. Check out the Yield Web Marketing Suite and Yield Web Marketing Suite for Agencies today!