Did you know that nearly as many Internet users respond to online display advertising by performing a search on a search engine (27 percent) as those who simply click on the ad itself (31 percent)? That’s just one of the data points included in the new white paper from Yahoo!, “Better Together:  Search and Display.”

Advertisers tend to separate their digital advertising into two flavors: they generally think of search advertising for performance marketing and turn to display for branding. It’s easy to see why most advertisers take this approach, since each channel plays a unique role in any given campaign.

But in practice, search advertising coupled with display advertising yields better results than when used independently. 

Download the paper here.

This statistical reality is one of the reasons Rich Ads in Search are so effective, too. Yahoo!’s innovative ad format allows advertisers to include video, custom search boxes, logos or images alongside a traditional text search ad, bringing together the virtues of both search and display.

— Chris Marlowe

The latest version of Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop launched recently. You provided us with feedback during our Beta and in webinar surveys. Our product folks listened, and they thought that these new features might assist you in your attempt to be efficient as well as productive:

• Select Excluded Keywords. Let’s say you’re selling plasma televisions at your electronics store. You may not want your ads to show when searchers enter “astrophysical plasma” or “blood plasma”. Selecting these terms as excluded keywords from the new Excluded Keywords tab in Search Marketing Desktop’s data grid can prevent your ads from displaying for these terms.
• Switch between Accounts. Do you manage more than one account? Now, you can switch between those accounts by clicking on Get Account, and then selecting the Switch button.
• Download Specific Campaigns. It is no longer necessary to download all of your account’s campaigns when you only want to make changes to one or two campaigns. Campaigns that you have not downloaded are displayed in the Get Account/Campaigns popup window with a blue icon.

— The Team

When you were a kid, did your mom ever send you to the store with a list of things to buy? You may not have known it at the time, but that could have been your first introduction to the concept of scope (no, not the mouthwash—even if it was on your list).

Mom’s list may have confused you if she wasn’t specific enough about what she wrote down. Simply writing “tea” was fine, if the store sold only one kind of tea. On the other hand, if they offered caffeinated, decaffeinated, green and a hundred different flavored teas, that would leave a young errand runner mighty confused.

Read the rest of this “Best of  the YSM Blog” post.

You know it’s going to be a good day at SMX Advanced Seattle when someone hands you a Superman T-shirt. But since this  is the world of search marketing, the logo’s been reworked to read “SEO.”

Keeping up with search marketing best practices feels like a superhuman undertaking at times. Seems like things are constantly evolving. There’s always a new rule or conversion tactic or optimization tool. And social media has only made things more complicated.

That’s why for the next two days, we’re simplifying things for you. We’ll be highlighting the best tips, tools and advice—straight from the SMX pros…er…superheroes.

Tip 1: Do understand real-time search
Traditional search marketing is many-to-many: Many searchers asking questions, and many marketers providing answers. But with Twitter now fielding 18 billion searches per month, the paradigm is shifting. This new, so-called “real-time” search is one-to-one. One person asks a question that anyone can see and answer within seconds. Unlike traditional search, with Twitter, you know exactly who is asking and who is answering. This poses a big opportunity for marketers.

According to Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, marketers need to go beyond just brand monitoring on Twitter. He points to new tools like Replyz which make it easy for marketers to find relevant questions that Twitter users are asking. His advice boils down to Marketing 101: Listen to what your audience needs, provide good answers, and watch your reputation soar…real-time.

Tip 2: Don’t mistake quantity for quality
Fact: Your tweets will rank higher in real-time search if you have followers who are trusted authorities that deliver relevant content.  After all, the foundation of real-time search is authority, trust and relevancy.  According to John Shehata of Advance Internet, it’s not just about how many followers you have, it’s about how reputable those followers are. Tools like Twitalyzer, Klout, and FriendorFollow can give you a good idea on how your followers measure up and who you should be following.

Another smart investment to help build real-time reputation: high quality content that people want.  Stew Lingille,Vice President of Marketing at Mint.com, a personal finance service, suggests all content creators consistently monitor trending topics.  Look for high volume matches with keywords that are important to your target audience.

For example, when Mint saw a rise in searches for trillion dollars (around the time of the bailout) they developed differentiated content including a video around the topic.  The outcome: a number one page rank, thousands of visitors and a strong conversion rate.

Think beyond just reactive content development tactics too. One option: build out an editorial calendar around known, recurring seasonal trending topics.  Consider topics like “Black Friday” or “holiday discounts.” To drive better amplification, leverage unique data/insights that only you have and create compelling histographics, blog articles, and content tailored for each of your social networks.

Tip 3: Do use social media tools to optimize
Marshall McLuhan of “the message is the medium” fame also once said, “We shape our tools and afterwards, our tools shape us.” This couldn’t be more true in social media given the parade of new tools that are constantly cropping up. Here are some cool ones that Myspace’s Tony Adam shared at SMX for optimizing ROI from social media:

• For Public Relations: HARO: Help a reporter out, PitchEngine
• For Customer and User Insight: RapLeaf, Flowtown
• For Twitter Management: Soxialize, Hootsuite, Seesmic Desktop
• For Reputation Management: KnowEm, Social Mention, ScoutLabs
• For Social Media Analytics: BackType, SWIX (in Beta)
• For Forum Monitoring: Big boards, Omgili, Board Tracker

Tip 4: Don’t forget about conversions
Remember it doesn’t matter how much traffic you are able to drive to your website if no one converts once they get there. Focus on the basics like having a compelling value proposition. Creating differentiated landing pages that appeal to the emotional and rational sides of the user.  Having a clear call to action and minimizing distractions. Ensuring the promise in an ad is fulfilled in the landing page.  Developing designs and copy that are brand consistent.  Check out 20 more conversion tactics that Ionic Interactive’s Scott Brinker detailed during his “Pump up the Conversions” presentation.

Yahoo! at SMX
A day of incredible insights and networking was only made more enjoyable by Yahoo! who gave away (highly addictive) popcorn in purple Yahoo! megaphones that kept attendees coming back  to their Expo booth (#32) throughout the day.  Yahoo! also hosted a cocktail reception for all conference goers on the Expo Hall floor. Yahoo! team members staffing the booth spent the day engaged with customers and answering questions about a wide range of Yahoo! topics including the big one on everyone’s mind at SMX: the timeline and process for ensuring a high quality transition during the upcoming Microsoft Alliance.

Next up for our SMX coverage:  Best Practices for Local, Social and Video.

— Dianne Molina

Patterns in online behavior are tending to shift away from traditional search, though user behavior shows a notable opportunity in searches for highly specific items, or “structured objects”—things that include restaurants, products, cars, real-estate listings, cities, bands, sports teams, celebrities, sports players, and companies—according to a new white paper released last week by Yahoo! Labs scientists Ravi Kumar and Andrew Tomkins. The paper was released at the WWW 2010 conference in Raleigh, N.C.

Kumar and Tomkins analyzed data from the Yahoo! Toolbar, including about 50 million pageviews in March 2009. They found that users spent 21.4% of their time online time performing searches of one kind or another. These included main Web searches (6.2%), multimedia searches (1.4%), and searches for items such as those on eBay or Amazon.com (1.4%). In addition, search’s 9% of pageviews was responsible for 8.9% of direct referrals and 3.5% of indirect referrals.

The paper found that 20% of checkout pageviews were reached through search activity. But Kumar and Tompkins also noted that users spent about half their time browsing and one-third communicating.

“The future of search,” say the paper’s authors, “will include increasing focus on gathering, understanding and, when appropriate, serving structured information.”

The strong lead in structured object searching, as well as the increase in browsing and communicating, should give both search and display advertisers a clue as to where things are headed—and perhaps where to put their dollars.

Full disclosure: This paper is complex, and not for the faint of heart. The bold among you can read the full version here.

For a list of all the papers presented at the WWW 2010 conference, click here.

For another take, see James Temple’s article in the San Francisco Chronicle, and stayed tuned for more Yahoo! white papers to be released soon.

(Image by shuttermonkey via Flickr, CC 2.0)

— Michael Mattis

Tweeting Twitter
F.O.Y.’s (“friends of Yahoo!”) Danny Sullivan and Barry Schwartz are at Twitter’s “Chirp” conference in San Francisco today and tomorrow (tax day!). Follow Danny @dannysullivan and Barry @rustybrick, or catch all the action at @chirp. (You can also search #chirp on Twitter for even more.) And here’s a handy live stream of the events. There’s sure to be lots of news from the confab and the company, which now boasts 105,779,710 registered users, according to recent tweets, and now will include tweeted ads.

View Yahoo! Video on the iPad
The innovation just keeps rolling out over at Yahoo! Mobile. Those savvy guys and gals just released HTML5 playback for the iPad, which enables non-Flash video, so you won’t get that annoying blue question mark when all you want to do is watch a video. Click over to the Yahoo! Mobile blog for the deets.

Around the world with a mad man
Mediabistro’s Agency Spy reports that retired ad man Jay Shapiro, founder of BLUE, has built his own house on wheels and plans to drive it around the world. He’ll be accompanied by his cats, kids and wife. Whether the huge, biodiesel-powered vehicle will be more like the tortoise or the hare remains to be seen.

Making the case for mobile marketing
“Many marketers are overwhelmed by the technologies and terminology that fall under ‘mobile,’” writes Bryce Marshall in Chief Marketer. “However, the foundational components of mobile marketing are straightforward, support core marketing and communications programs, and deliver clear and measurable outcomes.” He goes on to offer tips on making the business case to your higher-ups.

Search market looking up
Good news for the search marketing biz—it was up 11 percent in the first quarter “on a same-client basis” according to a recent white paper released by Searchignite. So says Media Post’s Roger Barnette.

Creative spotlight: Ogilvy Brazil’s drunk driving PSA
How much was your most recent bar tab? Get busted for drunk driving—or, worse, get into a drinking-related accident—and it could be in the tens of thousands. The clever kids from Ogilvy Brazil run the numbers in this clever PSA. Hat tip to AdFreak for pointing this one out. Oh, and take a cab after your next three-martini lunch, OK?

— Michael Mattis

You may already know that Yahoo!’s Ad Delivery Report is a great way for you to track and impr0ve the effectiveness of your search campaigns. But did you know that the data can also be used to help your display campaigns perform better?

“I’ve used the Yahoo! Ad Delivery Report and enhanced reporting to leverage our search marketing insights to target display ad strategy and deliver greater results,” says Yahoo!’s Gabriel Elliott, an account executive who has helped many advertisers take advantage of these tools.

The Ad Delivery Report, helps advertisers fine-tune their campaigns by helping identify under-performing sites, block out any irrelevant publishers, and focus on the best performing sites.

Quelle surprise!
he Ad Delivery Report, combined with our enhanced targeting features is increasingly being used by advertisers to improve their display campaigns, as well as their search marketing campaigns, says Elliott. For example, one client who was targeting men to promote a new online football game with his display campaign discovered, to its surprise, that more women were actually clicking on its search marketing ads than men, according to the enhanced demographic reporting.

“This is a great example of Yahoo!’s ability to leverage its science and technology, combined with scale, to find out who your audience is and craft a more effective, more targeted display campaign,” says Elliott.

Audience insight at scale
“Only Yahoo! offers this kind of insight at such a vast scale,” continues Elliott. “Six hundred million people use Yahoo! each month, many of them already registered and logged in, offering advertisers enormous insights and precision-targeted opportunities.”

For more info, visit Yahoo! Advertising, or contact your Yahoo! Advertising account executive—a real, live person is there to help.

By the way, Gabe Elliott also founded our LinkedIn group. Join Gabe and the rest of us in the conversation on LinkedIn. You can follow Gabe on Twitter.

— Michael Mattis

How small business owners can use social media
It’s fast, it’s cheap and it can help you make the sale. For small and medium-sized businesses, social media can be an efficient way to harness the power of the Internet to increase sales. But where to start? Writing in Small Business Trends, Lisa Barone, co-founder and chief branding officer at Outspoken Media, Inc., shows the way.

Build up your online brand
Don’t ignore your brand when trying to make the sale, writes Christopher Wallace of Search Engine Land: “Contrary to what some direct response marketers might think, investing in your brand online is not just about spending money on the brand. Instead, it’s about building an entity that will resonate with your customers and keep them coming back again and again.”

300,000 iPads sold the first day
That prediction of 7.1 million iPads sold in 2010 alone is looking to become a reality, as MediaPost reports that 300,000 of the portable Internet contraptions were sold on the very first day they hit store shelves. As you may have read, we created an app for that. Here’s the review.

Search plus display: Where do I start?
Writing on AdExchanger.com, Dax Hamman, vice president of Display Media at iCrossing, writes about the increasing interdependence between search and display advertising, and offers some helpful hints on how to get going.

Best April Fool’s ad pranks
Starbucks announces 128 oz. “Plenta” coffee size; ThinkGeek unveils the iCade iPad holder;  the rock band Coldplay pushes its own fragrance, “Angst” (which doesn’t smell like teen spirit); Qualcomm warns of vicious butterfly attacks, and more from AdAge.

Creative spotlight: The iPad’s great, but will it blend?
In keeping with the April Fool’s Day spirit, the mad scientists at Blendtec put the iPad through its paces. Crunch!

Of course, the inspiration for this comes from Saturday Night Live’s infamous “Bass-o-Matic” skit. (That’s “some bass.”) Hat tip to AdFreak for pointing this one out.

— Michael Mattis

(Social Media image courtesy Intersection Cunsulting via Flickr, CC 2.0)

Riffing on our case study on Value City Furniture (“Getting Your Offline Online”), MediaPost’s Laurie Sullivan writes:

“Advertisers have finally begun to consider search retargeting as a way to increase accuracy when targeting ads. They’re still not ecstatic about the increase in price, compared with serving up plain old ads, but how can they ignore talk of campaigns that begin with $168 cost per acquisition and fall to $29, and .93 percent conversion rates that rise to 6.93 percent within one month?”

Sullivan interviews David Zinman, vice president and general manager for display advertising at Yahoo!, who notes, “It’s becoming easier for advertisers to take a data set and activate it against all inventory in the company’s target markets.”

And our own Gabe Elliott, the Yahoo! account executive who was essential to Value City Furniture’s success, leaves this comment:

“This is strong evidence that search marketers should not disregard display advertising as a performance solution. With the limited scalability of search, many of my clients here at Yahoo! are looking for additional solutions to efficiently increase revenues, and are finding great success with targeted display ads.”

Read the full article on MediaPost.

— The Team

Exporting values
“As companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter push their technologies around the world,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle’s Benny Evangelista. “Recent events show that they’re not just exporting the latest in online tools, but a basic tenet of the American way of life—freedom of speech.”

Behavioral ads raking in the dough
According to a recent survey by the Network Advertising Initiative, says Forbes’ Laurie Burkitt, behaviorally targeted ads have a conversion rate of 6.8 percent, compared to 2.8 percent for the non-targeted ads. “Behavioral targeting may keep advertisers front and center with their target audiences,” says Burkitt. “It may also keep some publishers in business.”

Yahoo! wins patent for behavioral ad targeting
Speaking of behavioral targeting, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently issued a patent to Yahoo! for “optimization of targeted advertisements based on user profile information.” Read the actual patent here. Yahoo!: Putting the science in “science, art and scale.”

Everyone needs a butler
What self-respecting Wooster wouldn’t want his very own Jeeves? But not everyone can afford to have a gentleman’s gentleman to do the butlering. But almost everyone can have their own brand butler. Brand butlers, says an article in Marketing Charts, are “brands that focus on assisting consumers to make the most of their lives, as opposed to the traditional branding model of selling consumers a lifestyle or identity.” Find out the eight categories of brand butlers and see if your brand can butler.

10 Steps to optimize your content marketing strategy
Writing from the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York last week, Lee Odden of TopRank sits in on a Digital Asset Optimization panel and offers a step-by-step program for optimizing your content marketing. “What can be searched on can be optimized,” says Odden.

Putting display in search terms
Writing in AdExhanger.com’s “Displaying Search” column, Justin Merickel, Vice President of New Product Development and Marketing at Efficient Frontier, explains how you can utilize search data to benefit your display campaigns by mapping audience segments to search term types.

More news from Yahoo!
In this New York Times article, Miguel Helft—who was once the author of this post’s next-door neighbor—tells how Yahoo! News has recruited almost a dozen journalists to beef up its news offering. “In February,” writes Helft. “Yahoo! News had over 43 million visitors, more than any other news site, according to comScore.” High-profile journos being welcomed to the Yahoo! News team include Michael Calderone (Politico), Jane Sasseen (BusinessWeek) and Anna Robertson, an Emmy-winning producer from ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

— Michael Mattis