There is a cool feature in the Yahoo! Search Marketing interface that allows you to separate your search network and content network distribution for any active ad group with only a few steps.
Breaking out your sponsored search tactic from the content network in two separate ad groups helps you manage your bids better since they’re more organized and it allows you to create different ad texts for two different audiences. Some say that people viewing ads on the content network respond better to promotional-salesy copy over people who perform an actual search.
Here’s how you do it:
- Go into your Yahoo Search Marketing campaign, select an ad group that is running both sponsored search and content network together.
- Then, towards the middle of the page there is a button that you can click that says, ‘split ad group’. Click it!
3. A window will pop up asking you to confirm that you want to split your ad group into two separate ad groups. Click the button that says ‘split into separate ad groups’ if you still wish to continue.
4. From there, you will be asked to name your two new ad groups. Click ‘save changes’.
5. Once you’ve done these steps, Yahoo will automatically separate your sponsored search from the content network into two separate ad groups. This takes about 30 seconds to complete.
After the separation is complete, you will have two brand new ad groups containing the sponsored search and content network tactics. Your original ad group that you separated, will be paused. Keep in mind that your Quality index will reset at this point for your original ad group. After speaking with my rep. about this, this is what he had to say:
The quality index score will reset. So there will be a period of learning. This may cause terms to have a slight increase in CPC before normalizing.
So just remember not to react too quickly to changes made by the split ad groups tool. Give it at least a week or longer depending on traffic volume to make an informed decision.
I really like that every once in a while Yahoo! will surprise me with a new feature that makes my life easier that Google AdWords doesn’t have. I think it’s a great feature and I wish Google AdWords had something identical. Not that it’s difficult to copy and paste some keywords and change some settings, but it’s nice Yahoo took that step out of it and does it for you automatically.
