Setting up Ad Groups in Yahoo is different than Google. Many people that work in the PPC world just outright avoid Yahoo Search Marketing because it is just harder to use and you have less control. This is very true. Yahoo is working on making it better in some ways like they are making a offline editor like Google Editor. What I wanted to do was to describe how to use Yahoo PPC so that it can make you money. Yahoo is number 2 when it comes to number of searchers and can make you some money. Yahoo will bring less traffic than Google but it will bring you sells. I have even seen in some cases where yahoo had a better cost per conversion (CPA). Yahoo has a few good thing that Google does not.

Yahoo and Google both have something called Quality Score. Yahoo gives a quality score to an ad group while Google gives quality score to an individual term as it is typed into Google in real time. When you set up your account you start off the same in Google and Yahoo. It is important to organize your keywords so that they are grouped by subject. Sometimes there will be keywords that seem to fit in 2 groups. You will just have to choose. There is no perfect way to do this but there are some rules to go by. The less keywords you have in each ad group the better. This does not mean one or two keywords per ad group or even less than 5. There are some ad groups that might just have 2 or 3 but for the most part you will have more.

The important thing is that when you write your ad you have the keywords that are in your ad group in it. This does not mean that every single keyword has to be in the ad it just needs to be close. It should be obvious if you see a group of words in an ad group if they need their own ad group.

In Yahoo you still have more work to do. You need to now split up your groups so that the higher CTR keywords are together. Put your head terms in a group and then split up your long tail keywords into 2 more groups. Put your low volume keywords in their own group and the rest in a middle volume group. Over time you will get more information and you will be moving some keywords around. You can keep the ad groups with the same name and just add –LV, -HV, -MV tacked onto the end.

When you set up your account only use standard match on most terms. When you do this you will not have the ability to use negative match. Yahoo just does not give you the control you have over at Google. If you just really want to use advanced match be careful and set up negative matches and watch your log files.

If you use Google Analytics you will need to set up Keyword URL tagging in yahoo so you can split your PPC data from your SEO data. The guys over at PPC Hero have a great write up on this.