I threw up a bunch of PPC campaigns on Yahoo the other day and was just going through optimizing them. A couple campaigns were really doing well. I decided to break out every keyword getting clicks and pumping it into its own ad group so that I can write ads much more targeted to that specific audience.
When I went in to the first ad group to add the negative keywords for the ad group I noticed an alert in Yahoo saying this: (Excluded words only apply if the advanced match type is enabled for Sponsored Search)
I had to stop for a second and think…what?
Well for the short answer, you have to use the advanced match type in yahoo to use negative keywords. As for the reason why…here goes.
- Yahoo’s advanced match is like Google’s broad match. Yahoo explains advanced match as being “for matches that use your keywords in various contexts.”
- Yahoo’s standard match is like Google’s phrase match. Yahoo explains standard match as being “for exact matches of your keywords or their minor variations.”
When using standard match, your a lot safer off. It is going to be like going in using phrase match where if you bid on “get new york times magazine” you’re only going to show up for that phrase or something EXTREMELY similar. The Standard match type displays your ads for exact matches to your keywords, as well as for singular/plural variations and common misspellings.
By using advanced match, you can open up new opportunities to find converting keyword phrases that wouldn’t have come through otherwise.
When a campaign proves to be profitable and you have done a bit of optimization, you can use advanced match with a good list of negatives. This will filter out any bad traffic that may come in from switching to the advanced match….yet leave you room to find out new keyword phrases to zone in on.
I personally use the advanced match with a good list of negatives most of the time. If you are new to the game I would recommend not doing that and starting with standard match, than graduating to advanced match. It just depends with how familiar you are with the traffic, market, etc.
What do you generally do with Yahoo, use standard match or advanced match?
standard, unless I have it really broken down well to a keyword or two per ad group, mostly because Yahoo limits the # of negatives I can use and their matches on advanced can be straight-up crazier than google.
It depends. I use a mixture of both. Sometimes I find big differences in CPCs for the same keyword with each of the match types. Do you find that at all with your keywords?
@Bree To be honest, I haven’t really paid enough attention to notice if the bid prices are different between the two match types. I will check into this 🙂
Small note to the article: Standard is NOT like Google phrase match. It is like google exact match + plurals + misspellings.
Advanced is like a mixture of google broad and phrase match (yahoo explains it like there must be all words in the keyphrase: http://help.yahoo.com/l/h1/yahoo/ysm/sps/start/overview_matchtypes.html ).
Very nice article, I was looking for this awsner on google, and found this , and helped me out. Thanks!