Weblitx Blog | The Mountain View

Super Bowl Related Searches Spike Day Before Big Game

As people prepare for Super Bowl parties across the country their using Yahoo search to help them get ready. One popular activity at parties is Super Bowl trivia and Yahoo users are searching around for stats on previous games and famous Super Bowl performances. Yahoo reports many queries for games from specific years and for the search term “Super Bowl trivia.” What’s the best snacks and goodies to fix for your Super Bowl party tomorrow? Users are scurrying to find out as searches for “Super Bowl party food ideas” , “Super Bowl appetizers” and recipes have spiked in the past few days.

Yahoo dug around for what users were looking for specifically in the states of Indiana and Louisiana, homes of the Colts and Saints respectively. They found that “Super Bowl tickets” searches in Louisiana had a buzz score 50 points higher than the same search in Indiana. That bodes well for Saints fans as the Pittsburgh Steelers carried the buzz score advantage over the Arizona Cardinals last year by 15 buzz points. Seems like the Who Dat Nation may have the home field advantage as many more searches for tickets are coming from Louisiana than Indiana.

Interestingly, one of the more common searches Yahoo reports is the phrase “Peyton Manning married”. Sorry ladies, Peyton has been married to his wife Ashley since 2001.

Good luck to both teams for tomorrow night’s game. As for us here at Weblitx – we’re predicting Colts by 10 – remember, you heard it here first!

New Options Allow Better Control For Yahoo Advertising Campaigns

Yesterday Yahoo announced the ability to setup separate ad campaigns with Yahoo Search and Yahoo partners along with separate bid strategies for both. This is a feature that has been available with Google for some time now, but up to this point had not been available with Yahoo. The advantage is more control and tighter ad targeting which obviously translates into better results and ROI (Return On Investment). For instance, you now can test ad campaigns strictly on Yahoo search coupled with a specific bid strategy and create a totally different campaign to run on Yahoo’s partner sites coupled with a completely different bid strategy. Some of the bigger companies that are part of Yahoo’s partner network are WebMD, Buy.com, CNBC and CitySearch.

As stated, this feature has been available on Google for some time now and we use it all the time when running our client’s campaigns. Generally speaking, we’ll bid lower on clicks generated through the network providers as the ads that show up there were not generated from a specific keyword or phrase typed in at a search engine, thus lower quality of impressions. You don’t want to be spending the same amount of money on this traffic as you would if say someone was searching specifically for a product or service you offer in the search box. Now don’t get me wrong. Yahoo and Google both attempt to make sure your ads only appear on relevant sites within their content networks based on your keywords and phrases so you can still get business this way. It’s just that you shouldn’t have to pay the same price as you would for the search results pages. Now you don’t have to.

When advertising on the Yahoo partner network you can even eliminate up to 500 domains of partner sites that are not performing well. This will allow you better targeting and re-allocate funds to better performing sites within the Yahoo network.