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When you are starting a new campaign in YSM or Yahoo Search Marketing, here are a few pitfalls to watch out for.

The default setting for the campaign is always set to “advanced” match. Change it to “standard” match. For those who are familiar with AdWords, advanced match is like broad match in AdWords and standard match is like exact match in AdWords. You will save yourself a lot of wasted clicks and you’ll be able to track more easily if you’re using pixels or subid tracking.

The other thing that is quite confusing is that the “advanced” match option can be set at the campaign, ad group or keyword level. Setting at the higher level will override the lower level settings. For example, if your campaign is set the advanced match, you can choose standard match at the ad group level but it won’t matter. Since your campaign is advanced match, everything will be set to advanced match. If you want to make selected keywords advanced match, then set the campaign and ad group levels to standard match and manually change the settings for specfic keywords.

I wish YSM had an easier system to navigate. Anyway…

Also rotate your ads by setting the “Optimize your ads” option to “No”. Otherwise, the system will try to show the ad they think is performing better. The default option is to let the system optimize your ads. If you want to do an even split-test, be sure to make this change.

From my own testing, YSM can perform way better than Google AdWords in terms of ROI. So if you already have a successful campaign in AdWords, be sure to port it to YSM and test it out. You might be surprised.

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