I was poking around some of the new Google FAQs, and found a set of guides published in 2003 by Google.

One of the guides I had seen before, The Maximum Effect, which was excellent for it’s time.

The information in them is worth perusing, however, they are 2 years old.

• Managing your AdWords Account [pdf] updated Sept-03
• Keywords, Queries and Leads glossary of search terminology [pdf] updated June-03
• Conversion Tracking Guide [pdf] updated Oct-03
• The Maximum Effect [pdf] updated Dec-03

Google Library Page

It looks like Google put together several in a short time span (updates September, October, December of 03) and then just stopped.

For those who like to read PPC PDFs, it is worth noting that Yahoo has re-released their workbook (PDF File) with the new Yahoo Search Marketing Brand.

The original Overture workbook was one of the best ones ever created by a PPC engine. The new one is fairly similar, however, it’s been updated with some newer information, and is definitely worth the read.

In a move that has been anticipated for quite some time, Yahoo announced yesterday that they will change the look of their paid results (those from Yahoo Search Marketing) beginning mid-January.

A new look is coming to the Yahoo! search results pages that
will translate into more clicks for your listings. On January
18th, Yahoo! will debut a streamlined design that will make
the search results displayed on Yahoo! even easier for
consumers to read. Our research has shown that by improving
the search experience in this way, advertisers can generally
expect to see an increase in clicks, while maintaining their
conversion rates.

How this change impacts your listings:

* Yahoo! will display shorter descriptions for Sponsored
Search listings
* You don’t have to make any changes to your listings; they’ll
be automatically shortened for you when displayed on Yahoo!
* If you’d like to optimize your listings for Yahoo!, begin
your description with one short sentence that includes your
keyword and focuses on your most important information in
the first 70 characters
* Over time, we will fine tune the exact character count that
we believe works best for advertisers and search users
* Most of our partners, including MSN, CNN, ESPN and Infospace,
will still display longer descriptions for your Sponsored
Search listings, though the exact length may vary from
partner to partner

Yahoo! is taking this step to improve the search experience
for its users. By continuously focusing on delivering highly
relevant search results in a user-friendly format, Yahoo!
also gives you the best possible platform for reaching customers
interested in what your business provides.

At present, on a 800×600 screen resolution (still used by a decent percentage of the population) Yahoo results are all paid except for the top organic listing. If Yahoo has a few special offerings for that result, or it has a decidedly local flavor, it’s possible that no organics from Yahoo will show, but instead local.yahoo.com links will be in that single spot.

What will make this difficult for advertisers is making determining exactly how your listings look at the 70 and 190 character limit. It might be best to build a 70 character ad for Yahoo; and then layer on an additional 120 characters for their partners.

The paid results on Yahoo are still based around the original pay per click engine launched in 1997 (full Yahoo Search Marketing Timeline here).

Several marketing studies, search usability studies, user experience studies, etc, has led them down this path. Interestingly enough, these new limits are strikingly similar to Google. One of the major differences between the search experience on Yahoo and Google is additional integrated offerings.

While both Yahoo and Google have properties that include classifieds, images, news, local, etc. Yahoo has many offerings for small businesses such as hosting, offerings for romantics such as personals, offerings for travelers such as Yahoo travel, etc. How Yahoo maintains exposure of it’s own properties while giving searchers a wide selection of options for finding information will be interesting to see.

Hopefully, they’ll finally give in and include Mindset results.

It has yet to be seen how this will affect CTRs (click through rates) of advertisements on Yahoo and how much this will help their profitability versus the user experience.

I’ve been expecting this, and several other major changes from Yahoo, in Q of 06. Stay tuned for more, this won’t be the only significant change Yahoo makes in the next few months. They’re starting to work on their magic formula for success, and not likely to slow down anytime soon.

John Slade (a really nice guy for those of you who haven’t met him - understands the value of information) just made a post on the Yahoo Blog that Overture (YSM - Yahoo Search Marketing - which ever name you wish to call them) have lowered their minimum deposit to $5.

This comes on the wake of another recent announcement of YSM dropping the minimum monthly spend.

This means, with an affiliate code, a new advertiser can get $30 deposited into their account from YSM, deposit $5 of their own money, and have $35 to try out this type of marketing.

While this might not seem like a lot of money, considering the average monthly marketing budget for a small business is around $233 (after yellow page funds have been removed), every change in dollar amounts is critical to brining on new advertisers.

This is yet another good move by Yahoo, who has just been on a roll lately with YSM and their Local projects. Can’t wait to see their next announcement.

Log into your account.

1. Click on Manage Sponsored Search (you should be at the category page)
2. Use the radio button to select the category you wish to download (leave it on all for all keywords)
3. Click the download button
4. Save the file.

This includes your keywords, descriptions, and destination URLs.

In step 2, you can also click on a particular category and download just that category.

The outputted sheets are the same format as the bulk upload. Therefore, if you use the bulk upload function, you can change titles, descriptions, or destination URLs in this sheet and then send it to your Overture rep to upload.

This is by far the easiest way to change a lot of tracking URLs, many description (like if you use time sensitive pricing), etc.

The $20 minimum spend for a Yahoo Search Marketing account has been one reason some small businesses stayed away from YSM.

YSM Local did not have the $20 minimum, so it did gain some popularity because of that simple reason.

With this simple change, I’m expecting many small business to move some dollars (although small) from YSM Local and AdWords.

This has been a much asked for change, as before, many companies were working with ‘bundled accounts’ (where 2-5 clients occupied the same account) or with ‘micro accounts’, which most people don’t even know exist, and unless you dealt with thousands of small businesses, really had no use for.

This much welcome change will definitely change some PPC execution strategies.

Yahoo announced the acquisition of Whereonearth.

It looks like a move to help Yahoo’s local based targeting.

While local.yahoo.com has more (but not QCed) info than local.google.com, their IP targeting efforts with Overture and other advertising have lagged behind.

Overture has constantly relied on user data or explicit search queries for local targeting.

With the acquisition of whereonearth, which is billed as a ” Geographic Information Systems (GIS) experts” hopefully,this will begin a chain of events where Yahoo Search Marketing will release some new geo based targeting options.

YSM was the first company to take full advantage of the pay per click advertising model with large syndication deals to third party search engines. The distribution network they started several years ago has never slowed down, and YSM continues to look for new and interesting ways to introduce their model in not only search engines, but in other forms of media as well. They’ve had quite an interesting history as they went from a small startup company to one of the largest search marketing reaches. Here’s a brief history of a small company known as GoTo.com.

1997: GoTo.com launches.

GoTo.com was founded by ideaslabs. It did not yet have a public offering.

February 21, 1998

GoTo.com presents a proof of concept testing at TED8.

With little fanfare, the new paid search engine launched. For the first year of GoTo.com’s existence, most advertisers received little traffic, and the engine seemed to brand itself as more of a search engine than an advertising platform.

June 15, 1998: GoTo.com announces backfill deal with Inktomi.

This was a big breakthrough for GoTo.com. It began to backfill its paid listings with search results from Inktomi. This allowed the search engine to further brand itself as a search engine because it could now show results for any search query through Inktomi’s technology.

The first major milestone for GoTo.com on the advertiser front. Passing 1000 paid advertisers was a big deal, but the search engine was still unfriendly to many of those advertisers as there wasn’t a self serve platform.

June 1 1999: GoTo.com launches toolset to let advertisers take control.

The largest change from a rep based system to a self serve system. GoTo.com launched a toolset to allow advertisers access to keywords and real time bidding. Today, this toolset is known as the DTC or direct traffic center.

June 1999: GoTo.com goes public.

In a short two years, the company went form being launched to going public. This shows the vision and foresight of many of its founding members.

Oct.8, 2001: GoTo.com changes its name to Overture Services.

The first of two re-brandings for the paid listing search engine. It changed its name to Overture Services.

November 20, 2001: Overture teams up with Yahoo.com.

The first major destination deal for Overture occurred when Yahoo began to feature the paid Overture listings on Yahoo search results. This quickly became the mantra for Overture. As it realized it wouldn’t compete with other portals as a destination zone, it began to partner with these portals to give its ads visibility and for the search engines to further monetize search results.

March 2003: Overture buys AllTheWeb.

Overture’s first move towards owning it’s own search technology was acquiring Alltheweb.

April 28, 2003: Overture completes purchase of Alta Vista for $106 million in stock and cash.

Alta Vista was once one of the major search engines with its own user base and technology. Overture acquired them and began to implement some of its search technology into their result sets.

Oct. 7, 2003: Yahoo completes purchase of Overture for $2.2 billion in stock and cash

Yahoo acquires Overture. Overture had become a major income stream for Yahoo, and was very dependent on them for search based revenue. The purchase of Overture gave Yahoo control not only over Alta Vista, and Overture. But soon became the first portal to own 4 engines as Yahoo now owns Inktomi, FAST, AllTheWeb, and Overture.

April 18, 2005: Overture Services changes name to Yahoo Search Marketing.

The second major re-branding effort for the paid listings provider. In an effort to brand Overture as an integral part of Yahoo, the thinkers at Yahoo changed the name in order to show the synonomity of these two systems and further attract advertisers with a self serve Yahoo branded model. At this time, Yahoo Local was also bundled under YSM control, although the local advertising remained unsupported by YSM staff and is still quite early in its development and monetization stages.

From small roots with an idea, GoTo.com went from a small company to becoming an integral part of one of the top internet platforms known as Yahoo.

Yahoo Search Marketing has taken a lot of flack (many of it deservedly) over the past couple months for the API and DTC being down routinely.

It’s become such as issue that many have forgotten that there are those users who prefer YSM to AdWords. Thought I’d toss a list together of why some people really enjoy using YSM over AdWords. (Personally, I like them both, I think of them as different - not better or worse)

1. Advanced match is much more predictable than expanded broad match.
2. You can see your position.
3. You can bid to position.
4. You know what you’re paying per click (no odd formula you have to reverse engineer).
5. You can see average bids for keywords.
6. Keyword suggestion tool has counts.
7. Bid tool shows what everyone is bidding.
8. Your account is off or on - if your bids are highlighted in bold, then your account is currently online.
9. The ‘easy track’ feature makes it easy for a tracking system to grab variables.
10. The API doesn’t have a query limit.
11. It’s very easy to reorganize an account.
12. Separate bids for content vs search.
13. The ability to use a separate title/description for every keyword (especially when you’re in the 10k range) - try making an AdWords account with 10k AdGroups.
14. Reps usually answer the phone.
15. Reps often call back within an hour (and often minutes) if they were on the phone when you called.
16. Multiple reps (many agencies work with a ‘team’ so if one rep is busy, you have a team leader, backup reps, and horizontal members).
17. I can get someone on the phone in minutes for API support.
18. Overture will give click and billing estimate proposals for new clients.
19. ‘Bounties’ or ‘Affiliate bonuses’ for opening new accounts.
20. Have local PPC distribution which doesn’t require a website.

Overture local advantages:
No need to choose geographic keywords
Overture leverages user data for searches
No minimum budget (precision match is $20/month)
No website required

Overture local disadvantages:
Must use business name as ad title
One ad per account, no matter how many keywords
Bid placement for positions other than #1 are about impossible to predict (no bid tool for local)
local.yahoo.com is currently showing more national ads than local
yahoo.com is showing more local ads than national for local based queries

The concept of overture local is good, and since there’s no minimum budget, it’s worth trying out. However, if you want to advertise on across the Yahoo network, precision match accounts with geographic keywords can be much easier to work with.

Overture announced today that it will re-brand itself as Yahoo Search Marketing.

This is the second attempt for the grandfather of PPC engines to re-brand itself, having done so from GoTo.com to Overture a few years ago.

It looks like the official change will coincide with a Webmaster World search conference. Expect to see a nice party to annouce the change.