According to a Yelp news release, “Yelp will surface content including, review snippets, photos, business attributes, and more, to Bing users in the U.S. This content will be featured prominently on relevant Bing Local pages, presenting information to help consumers do more with businesses near them.”

During the same week, Yelp also announced it had joined forces with Apple. Yelp will now provide information for Apple’s new maps application as well as providing more content to Siri. The announcement was a giant step forward for both Yelp and the businesses that have already taken advantage of the Yelp platform.

If your business is not currently listed on Yelp, considering the following:

• Yelp had an average of approximately 71 million monthly unique visitors in Q1 2012
• 6.3 million unique visitors used a Yelp mobile app
• Every second a consumer looks up or calls a business from a Yelp mobile app (Q42011)
• A photo was uploaded every 30 seconds from a Yelp mobile app
• Yelpers have written over 27 million local reviews.
• Over 40% of all Yelp searches come from their mobile apps. (Q4, 2011)

It only takes a few, simple steps to have your business up and running on Yelp so you can take advantage of all the new exposure Yelp is receiving.

1. Claim Your Listing – Business owners can list their businesses on Yelp for free! Setting up an account allows you to respond to customer reviews, message your customers, view business trends and create special Yelp deals. Click Here to get started.
2. Add Information – Add a detailed business description, up-to-date information, business history and specialties. All this information will show when I user visits your Yelp page and some of the information will be used in the new Bing local searches.
3. Add Photos – Upload some photos of your business as well as photos of the product or services your offer. A recent Yelp study found “People searching Yelp for great local businesses spend 2 and a half times as much time on a business page with photos as opposed to one without”. You can’t take advantage of having photos show in the Bing local searches for free if you don’t upload them!
4. Accumulate Reviews – Encourage your customers to provide feedback on Yelp about their experiences with your business. As you accumulate positive reviews it will raise your Yelp “Score” and will help to push any negative reviews lower. Yelp provides some helpful advice on responding to reviews.
5. Advertise on Yelp – Yelp Ads offers targeted advertising to increase your exposure on relevant searches and nearby business pages. Yelp Ads, similar to other search engines, are placed at the top of search results pages, so that users searching in your area will see your business above Yelp’s natural search results. Advertising on Yelp will also remove competitor ads from your Yelp business page, allowing you to keep the purchasing focus on your business!

Yelp has become a trusted resource for information and reviews amongst consumers. It is one of the dominant alternates to the old “Yellow Pages” directories that are quickly become antiques.  As the use of mobile devices and local searches grow, so will Yelp. Take steps now to ensure your business is taking full advantage. Share your Yelp stories below; I’m eager to hear how it has affected your business!

Near the end of April, Google shocked advertisers with another not so welcome change to the AdWords platform. It announced the end of the “Rotate evenly “ Ad Rotation option.  This option does just what you think it should. It allows for you, the advertiser, to rotate your ads at an evenly weighted distribution. It’s used by advertisers in the know who wish to properly test ad copy. The default rotation setting on Google is “Optimize for clicks” this setting causes Google to show the ad it thinks will be clicked most often there by giving the best user experience to the searcher. We’re sure money has nothing to do with it but then again Google sent us a gallon of its Kool-Aid to drink while reading the announcement.

The new setting replacing this option was supposed to rotate evenly for 30 days, and then switches it to Optimize for Clicks. This was very upsetting to many agencies and advertisers because they would no longer be able to properly test their ads. Because ads often don’t get enough traffic to make a determination within that 30 day window, the move seemed a deliberant attempt by Google to increase their profits and further strip control away from the advertiser.  If anything, it was a step back in functionality all in the name of user (Searcher) experience.

Needless to say, torches were lit and pitchforks were raised as a petition was circulated around the search marketing industry for weeks asking Google to give us the option to opt out. We all banded together to battle this epic paradigm shift in advertiser control. And guess what? Our cries were heard and a compromise has been made!  A few days ago, Google announced it would be extending the 30 day rotation period to 90 days plus it has given advertisers the option to permanently opt out, you can do so by clicking here. Google has stated that “…If we see a large amount of demand for the opt-out over the next few weeks, we’ll also offer the opt-out in the AdWords interface directly.” So by all means, opt out!

If you’d like to get the scoop direct from the horse’s mouth you can read about it on the AdWords Blog. Happy testing everyone!

Not-yet-breaking-news!  Be prepared to spend more time working in your AdWords account, because Google is soon to release a change to keyword match types that will require a lot more attention to previously low-risk keywords.

One of the first things you learn as a PPC analyst is the difference between match types in Google AdWords.  You’ve got your exact match: safe, reliable, no-frills, thrills, or surprises…you get exactly what you pay for.  You’ve got phrase match, which adds a little intrigue to the mix, opening up new possibilities, letting you test your balance with training wheels on.  And then there are the broad matches, the wild card risk takers of the keyword world.  All essential players in an optimized PPC account, all requiring their own unique strategy for management.

But now Google is throwing us a curve ball, known as “near-exact” and “near-phrase” match types, coming soon to an AdWords account near you.  What does this mean?  With near exact and near phrase match types, your keywords will match with plurals, acronyms, abbreviations, and misspellings of your keywords.  What continues to distinguish this matching from the two forms of broad matching is that your near phrase and near exact keywords will not show for synonyms of your keywords as they do for broad match.

As a long time PPC geek, this *addition* to the AdWords match type arsenal is quite welcome.  Gone will be the days of racking our brains for every plural, misspelled, or mis-typed possibility for a keyword to add to an account.  This should save some time in keyword list building and will easily open up the reach of our keywords, allowing for higher impression and click volume potential.

That being said, there are certainly some words of caution to be heeded before going full speed ahead with near-phrase and near-exact.  The increased liberality of these match types (beyond traditional phrase and exact) will mean that advertisers should be paying more attention than ever to their search query reports, diligently making sure that these broader match types are continuing to deliver quality traffic and not showing ads for low relevancy search queries.

Another rumored aspect of this match type switch up from AdWords is that, while it will initially be a feature that you can opt out of using, eventually *all* accounts will be transitioned to near-phrase and near-exact…meaning that traditional phrase and exact match types will no longer be available to AdWords users.  My guess is that a forced migration such as this would be quite disappointing to the PPC community, this geek included.  Additions to the arsenal for paid search success are always welcome.  On the other hand, sweeping changes aimed, ultimately, at increasing advertising spend and profit for the advertising platforms without regard to the impact on the many small and medium sized businesses utilizing the platform…not so welcome.

Stay tuned to the Leverage Lowdown as this story breaks!

The world of Pay-Per-Click is constantly releasing new improvements to help enhance campaign reporting and analysis. The most recent release from Google, however, is one PPC professionals have been requesting for quite some time – conversion tracking metrics for Google AdWords Ad Extensions. With this new release, Account Administrators can now analyze conversion data for Sitelink, Product, Social, Call & Location extensions within the AdWords interface.

In the past, Ad Extension data has been limited to basic metrics such as Clicks, Impressions, CTR, etc. With the conversion metric implementation, however, advertisers are able to determine how target audiences engage with the various Ad Extensions, how often conversions occur, cost per conversion and much more. Although this data is a great way to evaluate extension performance, the information is limited in regards to Sitelinks. As it stands, Sitelink conversion data is compiled for all links in the campaign leaving no way to differentiate between which Sitelink is performing best.

At this point we’re excited to see and share what new developments the conversion data will provide Google AdWords campaigns. Stay up to date with your Account Manager or continue visiting our blog for more information as it becomes available.

This March, the Display Network, also known as the Content Network, turned 9 years old.  Just in time for the 9 year anniversary, Google announced significant changes will be taking place on the Display Network.  Some of the features are already available, and the rest will be rolled out over the course of the month.  You definitely need to take note of the new changes because they will significantly impact the way you use the Display Network moving forward.  In this post, we will take a further look at what Google is doing and how you can effectively utilize the changes.

The New Display Tab

Google is creating a new Display Network Tab to join the host of other tabs in your Ad Center Interface. The new Display Network Tab interface has been rebuilt from the ground up to help you efficiently run your Display Network campaigns.  It will enable you to bid, target and optimize your display campaigns all from the same interface.  The new Display Network tab will combine the current “Networks”, “Audiences” and “Topics” tabs and allow you to bid, target and optimize your campaigns all within the new tab.

Contextual Engine Upgrade

The contextual engine has been around for a while.  The engine matches your ads to pages within the paid search network based on keywords you specify within each ad group.  With the addition of the new Display Network Tab, the contextual engine is receiving its biggest enhancement ever – the ability to combine the reach of the Display Network with the targeting precision of the Search Network.  The new engine accomplishes this feat by using “Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting”.  In layman’s terms, this means that you can fine-tune the performance of your contextually targeted Display Network campaigns down to the individual keyword level.  If utilized correctly, the new targeting options will help you take the performance of your Display Network marketing campaigns to a completely new level.

Visual Diagram

Some of us are visual learners, and I am just one of the many.  Google is finally giving some love to those of us who are visual aide fans with the introduction of a new Venn diagram.  Now, whenever you are adding or editing your Display Network targeting options, you will see a Venn diagram that shows how your targeting methods interact with each other.  The diagram will include placements, interactions, and keywords, and the overlapping sections will show you what methods are currently being used to target your ads.  The diagram introduces a new and improved way to how the reach of your campaigns is impacted by combining multiple targeting types.

Keyword Level Data

We saved the best update for last.  Google will be implementing a new feature that offers users the ability to see keyword level performance on the Display Network.  FINALLY!  I know many of you have shared my frustrations in not being able to see and utilize this kind of data in the past.  The new feature will allow you to see the performance of display campaigns at the individual keyword level.  If you are brand new to the Display Network, marketers previously had to use themed ad groups each with their own keywords in order to try and optimize the targeting of the Display Network.

Do not confuse the Keywords Tab with the new functionality of the Display Network Tab.  The new keyword performance statistics for the Display Network will only be available in the Display Network, and the Keywords Tab will continue to show keyword statistics for the Search Network.  If you choose to add or edit keywords in the main Keywords Tab, any changes made to those keywords will affect both your search and display network targeting.  This means it is more important than ever to keep your Search Network and Display Network campaigns separate.  However, the new feature will improve the effectiveness of extending your search based campaigns over to the display network.

As a professional in the Search Engine Marketing field, I believe these changes will dramatically change the effectiveness of the Display Network in the future.  While some of these changes would have been welcome years ago, I applaud Google for implementing the new features sooner rather than later.