UPDATE: Keyword Unmapping Postponed
We recently notified you about a change to the way we “map” keywords for the Standard match type. A limited number of synonyms that are currently mapped in your account will be unmapped in the near future. The original launch date that was communicated, July 29th, has been postponed by a few days.

We will notify you shortly after the launch so that you can begin uploading new terms. If you have any questions regarding this change, please contact us.

———————————-

Today we received a an email from Yahoo concerning one of our search accounts. Yahoo is going to be implementing keyword changes July 29th 2008. Here’s the email in its entirety:

We wanted to let you know that a limited number of keywords in your account that are currently linked to synonyms, or “mapped,” will soon become unmapped to give you more control over your keywords. As you may know, we use various matching technologies to link some bidded keywords to other terms that a searcher might use synonymously to look for them. This mapping connects some keywords with related synonyms, such as “car insurance” with “auto insurance.”

What does this mean for your account?
You may still receive traffic for these terms through the Advanced match type even after these terms are unmapped. For better control, however, we suggest adding these “new” terms to your existing account, along with new bids and ads. If you choose to add the new terms, keep in mind that they will be rejected as duplicates prior to July 29, if you are adding to the same ad group as your existing bidded term.

This seems like a good thing, the more control we have over our terms and their individual bids the more valuable our campaign. Yahoo has certainly taken a lot of heat recently from the industry including myself but this seems like a smart move. Please don’t stop here Yahoo!

Here’s the keyword that was mapped and its new terms via the email from Yahoo. I don’t think i’m giving away any secrets by posting this

Apparently Yahoo freaks out after you make a number of changes to your adgroups, and feels that your using to much bandwidth. I got the error below after about 35 text ad changes using their interface. A colleague of mine tried as well and it looks like it actually blocked our network, we’ll see how long it lasts for. Makes me feel good about paying money to use their service…..

Last week I saw a post on Search Engine Roundtable about users being frustrated over moving their Google accounts into Yahoo. I can totally understand their frustrations and I’ve had this happen as well. I’m going to to a quick walk-through below to show you how to successfully import your Google PPC campaign into Yahoo Search Marketing.

1. If you don’t already have the Google Adwords editor you need to download that under the tools section of Google adwords.
2. Next you need to open the Google Adwords editor and if this is your first time using it you need to import your accounts. Once this is done select which campaign you would like to move into Yahoo.
   
3. Once you’ve done this you need to do some editing to the excel file. The most important thing is to make sure you remove your negative keywords. Yahoo cannot accept negative keywords. You also want to look at your naming conventions and your tracking codes. I for example use GAW for Google and YSM for Yahoo. Hit save and hit ok after the warning about the unicode text format.
4. Once this is done go to Yahoo and then to import campaign. At this time you don’t want to import but you need to convert first. When it’s done converting download the file and open to inspect what changes you need to make. (Take a look at advanced match, standard match etc.) Then once you’ve made these changes make sure you save as a csv unicode txt. Your file must end in .csv
   
   
5. Now go to the import campaign option. Give it a name and upload.
6. Once the file is uploaded in Yahoo take a look at it. Make sure you set your negatives again The maximum amount of negatives is only 50 unlike Google so you need to set your negatives at the ad level as well if you have a large amount of negatives.
7. Now take a look at your daily budgets and take a look at your Geo-targeting and look at your content-match status too.

This is it. If I’ve left anything out please let me know. I am writing this kinda late

It appears that the Overture Keyword Selector Tool is back up and running according to reports from WebmasterWorld and Search Engine RoundTable. I ran a few searches myself and it’s still showing results from January 2007 but thats a lot better than what we’ve been getting the few week or so. Even though this tool hasn’t been updated for a while its still the best I’ve used in terms of solid numbers.

• Google for example gives you a Search Volume which doesn’t help me. It tells you whether it’s high, average, low or if there isn’t enough search volume according to them to even warrant a little green bar.

• Wordtracker uses metacrawler/dogpile to give you its numbers. According to the latest Hitwise data, Dogpile is one of many in the “other” category which in total only equals 1.4% of searches. How solid of data do you think you can get from this? (I do like features that Wordtracker has such as thesaurus, competitive analysis and lateral search)

Until there’s another way to get solid keyword estimates, I’ll be sticking with the Yahoo tool and utilizing the ones mentioned above along with it.