We closed out the first day of Boot Camp with the second part of a session with Michael Ober (@mikeober) from Yahoo! Mike covered the new enhanced targeting capabilities that were rolled out on Yahoo! Search Marketing in March, and how Y! Store owners can best leverage these new tools with the new demographic reporting just launched in their Yahoo! Web Analytics (Y!WA).
Enhanced targeting features are a great way to make sure you’re spending your money the best way possible. You can push more budget towards the demographics that give you the best conversion rates. Specifically, Yahoo Search Marketing now has the capability to target:
- Geographically (this existed previously, but you can now zoom in to the zip code level)
- Day Parting
- Age
- Gender
- Bid Adjustments (women convert better than men? Tell Yahoo to up your bids 10% automatically for them!)
- Improved Content Match
- Improved Forecasting
Mike broke this down into some real world examples – if you know from your analytics data that you get the most sales from the New York City area, specifically from men in their 20′s, and mostly between the hours of 9-5, you can target those demographics. These users are more valuable, and since they convert more often, you can tell Yahoo that you’re willing to pay 20% more to users that match those demographics. You’ll gain a higher position and more visibility for those users. In another example, a woman who sold yoga supplies found that she suddenly was getting orders from a small mid-west town she’d never sold in before. She was concerned about fraudulent orders, but it turns out someone had ordered an outfit from her. After wearing it to their yoga class, everyone else in the class went online looking for it. Word of mouth advertising is hard to track, but after checking in her Y!WA, she was able to establish the pattern and started geo-targeting the area.
At the end of the day, it looks like Yahoo wants a better search experience for their users. The more targeted the ads, the sooner they’ll find what they want, and the more they’ll return to Yahoo. And, as you weed out junk traffic and focus in on the users that convert, the better your return will be.
