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! :)