If you're anything like me, or really the vast majority of pay per click users, you spend the majority of your time and money with Google.  Of course, that's where the traffic and the money are right? Depending on who you listen to, Google directs  between 60% and 75% of search traffic, and probably as much or more of paid traffic.

And in spite of all the features, tools, and options - not to mention Adwords Editor - it's still the easiest to use.

That being said, if you're not using part of your search marketing budget at Yahoo you are leaving money on the table.  At the very least, successful Adwords campaigns should be duplicated on YSM. In fact, one of the most practical and valuable applications of SpeedPPC, the innovative software designed to speed up and optimize your ppc campaigns, is the ease with which you can put your SpeedPPC campaigns up on Yahoo, AdWords and MSN.

If you haven't kept abreast with YSM, you may also be surprised by some of the new features and functions. Yahoo is going to great lengths to compete better with Google - after all, search marketing accounts for the lion's share of Google's billions.

One new and interesting feature at YSM is the Ad Generator. Its purpose is to rapidly build multiple ads for split testing, or simply to see different copy combinations.  You enter a set of titles and body text. The Ad Generator then automatically combines them into various permutations of copy and headlines to form "candidate” ads.




Ad Generator then saves the candidate ads in a “pending” area outside of the ad group, where you can review and remove candidates you don't like. An ad optimization function then moves the remaining candidate ads into your ad group, where it compares ad performance - it keeps the best performers and deletes the others. Over time, the optimization function continually tests your candidate ads, keeping the best performing ads for your ad group.

Of course there is no reason why you can't also use Yahoo's Ad Generator to build out multiple ads, let Yahoo test and optimize them, then use though those ads to populate your SpeedPPC Ad Setup. Now you get the benefit of Ad Generator for Google and MSN as well.

To access the Ad Generator:

1.    In the Campaigns page, click on a campaign.
2.   Click an ad group you want to use.
3.   Click “Use the Ad Generator” (you'll see it above the "Keywords/Ads” table).


By the way, in case you haven't noticed, Yahoo has implemented its own Quality Score component. In my next article I'll talk about that in detail, so that you can use SpeedPCC to that same huge Quality Score competitive advantage in Yahoo that SpeedPPC gives you in Google.

Finally, there is Microsoft's bid for Yahoo. The one thing we can be reasonably sure of is that someone, whether it's Microsoft, AOL, or someone else, will end up buying or merging with Yahoo.  And you can bet that however it shakes that out, search marketing will be a primary focus of attention and investment.  So if you're not there in a serious way already, there's no time like the present.