Analytics Avenue

ADVERTISERS: How would you like to save yourself a bundle of advertising dollars and heart ache all at the same time? Well, you can. And it can be done IMMEDIATELY by using the 'Assist' metric from your Yahoo! Sponsored Search account. This is a "no brainer " people! I've even broken it down into a simple basketball analogy so that it's easier to understand. Every online advertiser should be interested in understanding this. The Yahoo! Assists Sports Analogy: Basketball coaches have to make decisions every day on which players will play based on metrics such as Conversions and Assists. Here’s a scenario…. Coach's Decision Without Factoring In Assists Player A scores 2 conversions (for 4 points) and Player B scores 12 conversions (for 24 points). If the coach only measures performance based on conversions, then which player will he bench in the next game? Player A, of course, due to poor performance. Coach's Decision Factoring In Assists We find that wh...

If there is one group that has pulled back on their budgets of late, it's the group that spends their money on online advertising. Over the past few months there has certainly been a decline in online spend by many advertisers. Most would agree that the reason for the pull back in online spend is because of the current state of the economy. But to me, it's much more than that. While I agree the economy has played a major role in reduced online spend budgets, I can't put all of the blame on it. In my opinion, a lot of the blame needs to go to the lack of helpful online advertising measuring tools. Can you really blame an online advertiser for pulling back their spend budget when they can't really measure the true value or success of their campaigns?? But what about all of those web analytics solutions that are available in the market? Shouldn't online advertisers be using those to help them understand the success of their campaigns? Sure, and many advertisers do tr...

I'm starting to think that there might be some confusion out there about the new Yahoo! Web Analytics (formerly IndexTools ) and Yahoo's Search/Campaign Analytics. So let's clear things up! Yahoo! Web Analytics ( http://www.web.analytics.yahoo.com/ ) Y!WA is the re-branded version of IndexTools that was announced about two weeks ago. While Y!WA is not available to everybody just yet (expect a full launch in 2009), it is currently being made available to: - Yahoo! Small Business owners, also known as Yahoo! Stores http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/ - Y!OS - Yahoo! Open Strategy http://developer.yahoo.com/yos/intro/ - Yahoo! Micro-sites (partners sites that Yahoo! builds). Example: http://promotions.yahoo.com/honda Y!WA is an enterprise level solution that provides both web site measurement and campaign/keyword measurement capabilities. Yahoo! Search/Campaign Analytics Yahoo! Search/Campaign Analytics is available to all advertisers with a Yahoo Search Marketing ...

Lately I've been seeing a lot of stories being written about the growing gap between search and display spend. During these hard economic times, it appears that more advertisers are starting to move their online advertising budgets towards search instead of display because: 1. Advertisers prefer search advertising over display advertising because of the simplicity of tracking search. 2. Advertisers feel that search advertising performs better than display advertising. I'm here to say that nothing could be farther from the truth! Tracking display ads is actually pretty easy. And if you feel that search ads perform better, then you may be risking a 22% lift in conversions by not running display advertising with your search advertising. Let's tackle these myths one by one. Question 1 Sure, tracking search is pretty easy when using Yahoo Analytics or Google Analytics. All you have to do is add the vendor's tracking scripts to your web site's pages. But tracking display ...

I've just added Yahoo's new Pingbox widget to my blog. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about Yahoo's web analytics while reading my blog site, feel free to use Pingbox to send me a question. As long as I'm online and not in a meeting, on the phone, working on a project, or supporting a client in need, I'll send you a quick message back. It works just like any other instant messaging service that you have used. The only difference is that Pingbox will keep you anonymous. Thanks again for your blog support! Matt Lillig

As a Yahoo! Sponsored Search advertiser, have you ever just wanted a campaign tracking tool that provides you with simple, easy-to-read, conversion performance reports? If the answer is YES, then you should be making use of the 'Conversion Only' tracking that is available in your Yahoo! Sponsored Search account. With 'Conversion Only' you'll be able to report on Conversions , Cost Per Conversion (your cost to get a sale), Cost (cost of your clicked ads), Revenue (your earnings from sales), Revenue Per Conversion , ROAS (return on your ad spend), and even Yahoo's famous Assist report (keywords that have contributed to the conversion on your other keywords). Implementation Implementation of 'Conversion Only' is easy. All you need to do is: 1. Log into your Yahoo! Sponsored Search Account (select the Administration tab --> select the Analytics link) 2. Activate 'Conversion Only' 3. Copy the 'Conversion Only' tracking script and past...

Maybe all of this blogging about Yahoo's web analytics is finally paying off! According to the recent report I ran on Google's Insights report for the terms "web analytics" and "online advertising", the #1 Rising Search phrase for analytics from January '06 to August '08 is................"yahoo web analytics" http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=&q=%22web%20analytics%22%2C%22online%20advertising%22&geo=&date=1%2F2006%2032m&clp=&cmpt=q If you think that phrase is rising now, just wait until we finish integrating IndexTools! :)

Cost of searching on Google: $0 Cost of searching on Yahoo: $0 The rising trend of Googlers searching for the term "yahoo" on Google..... PRICELESS! (A shout out to Stephane Hamel for correcting me on this)

If MC Hammer says it...it MUST be true. Whoa....whoa...whoa....whoa...whoa...STOP...analytics time! http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/analyticstime/

Like peanut butter and chocolate, Michael Phelps and gold medals, and Britney and K-Fed ....some things were just meant to be together. OK , maybe not Britney and K-Fed , but the others on the list stand true. What about online advertising's biggest money makers Search and Display though? Were they meant to be together? Well, based on the fact that most companies still track their search and display efforts with separate teams, the likely answer is..."I don't know". If it was up to Atlas Solutions however, their latest report findings would have you believe that search and display should be together more than Harry and Lloyd (from "Dumb & Dumber"). Their findings showed that, "When marketers supplement search with display impressions, they get a significant lift in conversions. Unfortunately, most advertisers that run both search and display are unaware of this...” The study demonstrated that "users exposed to both search and display ads con...

I had a comment on one of my posts about the Assists report that I wanted to share because I think it's a good one to discuss. It read: "I have a question, normally the assist counts are bigger than conversion, why is this happening?cause I bet assist would be counted in a case conversion happens, so the counts of conversion and assist would be same or conversion could be bigger." For those asking the same thing when looking at your Yahoo! Analytics reports, here was my response: Good question. Sometimes you might see 2 Assists and 0 Conversions for a campaign and wonder, "How can this be?" This happens because the Assists are being attributed to other campaigns and not necessarily the campaign you are looking at. For example, let's say I'm looking at the data for Campaign A. Over the past two days I see that it has received 0 Conversions (meaning visitors clicked on the ad for Campaign A, visited your site, and never converted). Campaign A does however ...

Every month there is a comparison report released by ComScore that discusses the paid click search engine battle between Google and Yahoo!. For example, you may have recently read a headline titled, "Google moves further ahead of Yahoo in paid ad clicks". The press simply eats these reports up because they enjoy writing about the big battle between Yahoo! and Google. But if they ever took the time to break the data down and really analyze it, they may be surprised to see that while more clicks mean more money for Google, it also may mean a higher CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) for their advertisers. So are these reports really valuable to advertisers? Should advertisers think that just because Google drives more paid clicks that they should only use Google (because a lot of advertisers do think this way)? Since those writers don't have the time to sit down and actually analyze the real data, I decided I'd do it for them and help answer these questions. So here it goes (No...

Seems as though there's been a lot of talk in the web analytics industry these days about 'visitor engagement'. What is it? What isn't it? How you define it for branding purposes? How do you define it for other purposes? How do you measure it? I'm seeing it being discussed in many blogs and the topic came up many times while I was attending the eMetrics Summit in San Francisco last month. It's a good topic and it got me thinking about how visitors engage using online advertising efforts (search, display, email, etc). And in thinking about online advertising engagement, I started thinking about the value of the Yahoo! Analytics' Assist report. Here's a simple explanation what what Assists are: "Assists are campaigns that helped contribute to the conversion of another campaign". For example, let's say I'm in the mood to buy a laptop. I click on a Sony display (banner) ad and reach the SonyStyle.com site but do not buy. I come back 30 days...

I'll be at the eMetrics Summit in San Francisco from May 5th -7th. Hope to see some of you readers there. For more information about this large web analytics event, please visit: www.emetrics.org Matt

While many of you know that I support Yahoo!'s current web analytics products called 'Conversion Only' and 'Full Analytics', many of you don't know that I also support two other products here at Yahoo!. One product is our Sponsored Search API while the other is what we call SSP...or Search Submit Pro. What is SSP? Well for those that have worked hard to manage their SEO (free or organic or algorithmic) listings to meet Yahoo!'s web crawler needs, SSP is a paid inclusion program that allows you to easily manage those organic listings without having to tweak your backend system (meta tags, etc). Many of you may not know that you can use Yahoo!'s 'Full Analytics' product to track the performance of your SSP listings.....from click to conversion. You can even get ROAS (return on ad spend or ROI) data for e-commerce sites that pass us revenue information. But before discussing tracking of SSP using Full Analytics, let's discuss what value SSP brin...

As many of you have already heard, the next big web analytics consolidation purchase took place on Tuesday with the announcement that Yahoo! has picked up the industry respected IndexTools. This is very exciting news for me because I have first hand knowledge of the IndexTools product and I support Yahoo's current web analytics products. A few years ago I worked for an SEM agency in San Diego called EngineReady ( http://www.engineready.com/ ). By the time I got there, EngineReady had already made the smart move of partnering with IndexTools so they could take advantage of IndexTools' web analytics product and include it as part of their SEM consulting services. I say "smart move" because EngineReady was one of the early SEM agencies to understand the value that web analytics had on helping online (pay-per-click) advertisers' improve their CPA and ROAS goals. As part of the EngineReady/IndexTools partnership, my role was to help IndexTools improve their US presenc...

For those who couldn't get enough of the last Full Analytics video, Eric has created another training video based on one of our external training decks. Sit back and listen in as Eric walks you through Full Analytics for Yahoo! Search Marketing. http://eham1906.blogspot.com/2008/02/yahoo-full-analytics-overview-by-eric.html

For those of you Yahoo! advertisers who are thinking about using and implementing Yahoo's Full Analytics, life just got a whole lot easier! One of my coworkers (Eric, your friendly technical account manager host in the video) and I put together a quick implementation video for advertisers. As always, this video was created with our customers in mind. Not that 'Full Analytics' was a difficult implementation before, but I figure, why read setup guides when you can watch a video (web 2.0 at its best)! "Can life get any easier?? I submit that it cannot!" - Brian Regan, Comedian To view a larger screening of the video, please click HERE .