I thiought I had written about this topic earlier, but I decided instead to cover another topic. But for the record, I agree with Amber at PPC Hero. Yahoo! IS giving bad advice.

Specifically, the advice has to do with putting your phone number in your PPC ads. Why wouldn’t you? If you can get a searcher to call you instead of clicking on your ad then you’ll save yourself some money in the end. Get their business and it’s even better. That’s just common sense, right?

I do disagree with Amber on one point.

I don’t believe a user wouldn’t click on your PPC ad just because you have a phone number listed.

I do believe they will. And that’s precisely why you should do it. I also believe Yahoo! believes a searcher will call you instead of clicking on your ad and that’s precisely why they don’t want you to do it. They’ll lose revenue.

Bottom line: You should do what makes sense for your business. Spend less, make more. That equates to using a phone number in your ads and taking the call instead of getting the click. Should every ad have your phone number in it? No. But that’s a different story.

Yahoo! posted 6 frequently asked questions about its Ad Optimization feature. Since the feature is turned on automatically whenever you set your ads to live status, we figured we’d cover this issue today and answer the question: Should you use the feature?

Here’s a basic run-down on what the feature does for you: If you are running more than one pay per click ad and you are using the ad optimization feature then Yahoo! will start out displaying the ads an equal number of times then switch to using the one that achieves the highest CTR most often. There is a huge problem with this strategy.

Let’s say you have three ads that target the same keyword phrase but are written slightly different. Ad A appeals more to a certain segment of your target marketing, Ad B appeals to another segment, and Ad C appeals to both segments equally. There is no crossover between the segments of your market attracted to ads A and B. If your two market segments tend to appear online at different times – let’s say segment A is on from noon to midnight and segment B is on from midnight to noon – then Yahoo! could be skewing your ads based on the time. Let’s see how …

Suppose your ads go live at 12:01 p.m. By midnight your segment A ad enjoys a 50% lead in CTR over your segment B ad and has a 10% edge over the segment C ad. Now Yahoo! starts showing your segment A ad more and your segment C ad slightly less but your segment B ad is only being shown 25% of the time – at a time when half of your target market would respond to that ad more than the segment A ad, which is being shown most often. You are losing money.

I don’t recommend this feature for most advertisers. New pay per click advertisers may be tempted to use the ad optimization feature, but I would caution you against it. You are much better off testing your own ads at different times of the day.

Yahoo! Search Marketing pay per click advertising is introducing some new features that Google and MSN adCenter have had for a long time. I say it’s about time!

The first feature is Demographic Targeting. I like this and I wonder how Yahoo! managed to go so long without it. The idea, of course, is to target your advertising to a specific demographic (age, gender, etc.). Way to go Yahoo!

Next, ad scheduling allows you target your advertising to your demographic or target market at certain times during the day. If you know, for instance, that people who are most likely to respond to your message are online between 5 and 10 p.m. EST then you can schedule your ads to run at that time.

Enhaned ZIP-Level Geotargeting is a feature that gets little notice even from PPC blogs or blogs that cover the online advertising niche, but it’s one that I especially like. This kind of geotargeting is very important for advertisers in rural areas and super-urban centers like New York City where you have a lot of ZIP codes in a very small space. Besides, I see geotargeting in general becoming more and more important to advertisers in the future and ZIP code geotargeting is one area that has a lot of potential, especially to companies that traditionally are disposed to direct mail campaigns.

If you’d like to read the announcement by Yahoo! Search Marketing, you can read their official blog announcement here.

The death of Yahoo!s Overture spelled disappointment for millions of Internet marketers and left us with no hope for free competing tools with WordTracker. But it didn’t mean there was no hope at all.

Recently, Yahoo! has announced some new keyword research tools, but they aren’t as good as Overture was in its hey-day. They really aren’t as good as Overture was near its demise, but they’re OK. They’re a nice try.

Yahoo! has assembled a list of keywords for marketers within specific industries. The industries represented include:

• Apparel
• Automotive
• Education
• Finance
• Health Care
• Home Improvement
• Legal Services
• Travel
• Wireless

The problem is the lists are general keywords that may or may not relate to your specific business, which means that you are building a niche website within these industries you’ll still have to do your own keyword research. Furthermore, the lists don’t provide any information that will help you make decisions about relevance and value of each keyword. They are just lists of keywords.

If your business doesn’t fall into any of these broad categories then you’ll have to start from scratch. Sorry.

This is a worthy effort by Yahoo!, but I’d say these lists will only benefit people who are very new to search engine optimization and paid search marketing. They won’t help veterans at all. Still, a place to start when you have no clue on where you should start is at least something. And that’s what Yahoo! deserves kudos for, if anything.

Learn more about the keyword lists here.

I can’t remember where I read it now but a few days I ago I read that Yahoo! had gained in search share by as much as Google had lost. It wasn’t much. It was either 3% or .03%. The author of the post suggested it might be because of some changes made at Google. I tend to think it is because of some changes made at Yahoo!

One change that could have affected this slow Yahoo! growth is the privacy policy that Yahoo! has rolled out. It now has the best privacy policy in the search business. But now, Yahoo! is targeting Google with new technology in the PPC space.

The idea is to give advertisers a better chance to target their pay per click advertising ads to the right audience. Google has been it for years. Yahoo! has tried but it hasn’t done as well as Google. Now, thanks to this new technology, Yahoo! may actually compete. We’ll have to see.

Could these new changes, and the addition of Carol Bartz as CEO, be the impetus for growth at Yahoo!?