I just wrote a pretty big e-mail to a friend who hasn’t had much success getting volume out of Yahoo PPC. These days, I’m not doing huge volume, but am paying for about 500 clicks/visitors per day via YSM (Yahoo Search Marketing). Here are some of the highlights from the e-mail I sent him:
Some of what I do is:
1 . Start with a high CTR by pausing low CTR keywords and possibly overbidding
2. Start with many diverse ads (10-15) some of which use DKI and usually my winning ad has DKI. I will write my own ads first then I’ll look at my competition and borrow common elements and mix and match them. I might copy 1 or 2 ads from the competition, but not always. Only if I get brain fried and need a couple more in the mix. I’ve never used my competition’s ad as the winner. Note that the more ads you start with, the more money you have to lose on the campaign to start out with, but the more likely you are to strike gold.
3. After my winning ad has established it’s quality index of 4 to 5 bars I’ll start backing down my bid
4. I back the bid off by no more than $.02 at a time. In some niches I may be starting with a bid of $1.50 or more and back it off every 30 minutes until I have at least a break even or a profit. So I’m losing money generally for about 3 days to a week(building ad quality), then breaking even or slight profit for about 1-2 weeks(building keyword history), then backing off on my bid more to attain a sustainable profit. If I’m losing money with the campaign I’ll limit my daily spend to about $30-$50
Note that the most important factors are split testing many ads, and having lots of keywords.
Another thing is that if you lower the bid on a keyword often it kills the volume on that keyword. Even returning to the previous higher bid doesn’t fix it. So back them down slowly. Because I make more money on different days/hours of the week I’ll back the bid down so I’m still making money at the worst time of the day/week and then use the ‘Campaign settings’-'Ad Scheduling’ to boost my bid back up for the more profitable times of the week. This does seem to be an important factor in maintaining volume.
If you build a campaign and nothing is happening, go to ‘Campaigns’ – ‘Editorial status’. Your keywords and ads may be under review. These reviews are either very fast or may take up to 3 days in my experience. You may also be waiting for a review of your landing page without knowing it. To test this, I may set my daily spending limit to say $10 and raise my keyword bid to as high as $5. If you still aren’t getting impressions, it’s a review you’re waiting for.
Assuming you aren’t waiting on reviews, if you still aren’t getting impressions. Just bid more. I’ll raise my bid by $.10 every 30 minutes until I see impressions. Then I’ll leave it there until I get some clicks. Then I’ll start backing it off very slowly. Set your daily spending limit at the beginning to protect yourself against over spending.
There is a lot more to what I do, but I don’t want to bore you too much right now. I hope you find something helpful here. Never give up! Always be refining your campaigns/landing pages
