Yandex launches a desktop application for managing PPC campaings

Yandex.Direct, the PPC platform of Yandex, has been around since 2001 and is the oldest system of contextual ads in Russia (Google launched AdWords in Russia in 2002). Even though it displays ads to over 22 million people every day and attracts hundreds of new advertizers from Russia and overseas, the user interface is, let’s say, not the most convenient. Managing large PPC campaigns through Yandex web interface is a challenging task. But from now on it will be much easier for all search marketers. Finally Yandex launched a desktop tool for managing Yandex.Direct accounts, similar to those of Google, Bing and Yahoo!. Please meet  Direct Commander!

The tool is available for Windows and Mac, but unfortunately the user interface is in Russia only. The first version of Commander is not as powerful as AdWords Editor, but it provides all the basic options you need for day-to-day PPC optimization. With the help of Direct Commander you can easily:

- Change campaign and ad settings (targeting, budgets, alerts, site exclusion, automated campaign management features such as Autofocus etc.)

- View statistics

- Create, edit and manage ads

- Add, remove and modify keywords

- Manage your presence in Yandex Catalog

- Import data from XLS and CSV files

The interface is very convenient, in my personal opinion. Commander window is divided into 3 panels

1. Campaigns

2. Ads

3. Keywords

The panels can be minimized if needed. I really like the fact that you don’t need to switch between tabs, but can edit the campaign at all levels simultaneously.

Direct Commander window

Of course, since it is the first version, there are a lot of functions that are missing. For example, it is impossible to download campaigns into Excel. Would be also nice to have the Yandex keyword tool (Wordstat) incorporated into the tool.

I am looking forward to more features in Direct Commander, but it’s already a big improvement. The tool is going to be great help to all search engine marketers optimizing for Yandex.

Dynamic Search Ads

Dynamic Search Ads look like other text ads that you see on Google search results pages. But in fact they’re a new way to target searches with relevant ads that link to the most appropriate landing page, all based on the content of your website. You don’t have to choose keywords, tell Google when you add a page to your website or take it down, or create an ad for each product page of your site. AdWords figures out when to show your ads based on the same indexing and relevance technologies used for Google's organic search.
How it works

AdWords uses content from your website domain to target your ads for searches


instead of keywords.


You can tell AdWords whether all pages or just specific sections should be used to target your ads by creating dynamic ad targets. Dynamic ad targets can be your whole website or specific sections of the following:
pages that belong to specific categories
pages that contain certain words
pages whose titles contain certain words
pages whose URLs contain certain strings

Using Google’s organic search index of your website, AdWords determines which searches might be relevant to the products and services offered on this website. When AdWords finds searches that are a match for your dynamic ad targets it generates a text ad in real time that links to the most appropriate page from your website. The headline is dynamically put together by taking words from the search phrase and content from the landing page used in the ad. The rest of the ad is a template that you wrote when you set up or edited your campaign.


Although Dynamic Search Ads change the way that ads are targeted for searches, they won’t impact the way that ads get ranked, the performance of your keyword-based ads, or the amount of control you have over your account.
Same ranking. When entering the auction, the ranking of a dynamic search ad is determined in the same way as keyword-based ads: the maximum cost-per-click bid that you’ve specified for the dynamic ad target and the dynamic search ad’s Quality Score using the same calculations that are used with other search ads. The cost for a click is based on your ad’s Quality Score and the AdRank of the ad just below yours, again, just like with other search ads.
Works with your keyword-based campaigns. Complementary instead of competitive, Dynamic Search Ads don’t trump keyword-based ads. Dynamic Search Ads only show when keyword-based ads for your domain aren’t eligible to run in the auction. And the performance of your Dynamic Search Ads won’t influence your keyword-based ads and vice-versa since AdWords handles the history of your Dynamic Search Ads separately from your other ads.
You’re still in control. With Dynamic Search Ads, you control the dynamic ad targets, ad templates, bids, and your budget. You can use negative keywords, like "free" or "returns," just like with traditional campaigns to avoid showing your ads on searches that don't convert into sales. And you can prevent advertising when specific words or phrases appear on the page, like "temporarily out of stock" or "sold out", when you add dynamic ad targets that exclude pages containing these words. You'll also get full reporting: see the headlines and landing pages of your ads, the ad generated, average CTR and CPC, and conversion data.
Who should use Dynamic Search Ads

You’ll probably get the most value from Dynamic Search Ads if you operate a website with hundreds or thousands of products, services, and listings that frequently change. Do you currently map keywords, bids, and ad text to each product listing on your website? Dynamic Search Ads can help you get more complete ad exposure for more of what you sell, while reducing the effort of keeping your ads, keywords, and destination URLs current.

All Technology predictions for 2009, and beyond

• A.J. Kohn, 2009 Internet and Technology Predictions on Blind Five Year Old
• 1. Facebook Becomes A Portal
• 2. Identity Systems Fail
• 3. Video Advertising Succeeds
• 4. Microformats Go Mainstream
• 5. Banner CTR Becomes Obsolete
• 6. RSS Adoption Spikes
• 7. Kindle 2.0 Flops
• 8. Google Search Share Stalls
• 9. FriendFeed Surpasses Twitter
• 10. Someone ‘Dies’
• Jo Best, Five tech predictions for 2009 on Silicon.com
• 1. The rise of 'free as in beer' software
• 2. iPlayer ushers in the death of the TV licence
• 3. Big boys feel the pain
• 4. Google reveals another surprise
• 5. Mobile broadband beats fixed
• Jeremy Liew, Consumer Internet predictions for 2009 on Vator
• 1. Consumers seek cheap thrills
• 2. Trading real money for virtual goods
• 3. Web 2.0 leaders pull further away from the pack
• 4. on line ad prices continue to fall, alternatives help make up some of the ground
• 5. Getting serious about monetizing non U.S. traffic
• Dion Hinchcliffe, The Top Internet Predictions for 2009 on Social Computing Magazine
• 1. Site mergers/acquisitions for some of the weaker social network platforms
• 2. Stronger push towards identity portability and friend (social graph) portability.
• 3. The future of social media is user's owning their data, deciding who to send it to.
• 4. Companies finally building for revenue in the social and any other space on line.
• 5. Social Media will cease to be such an 'experimental' field in marketing and will start to become part of the main core of good campaigns.
• 6. The opening of social networks so that they can exchange profiles, social relationships, and applications.
• 7. Social media in 2009 becoming more and more accessible to mainstream audiences.
• 8. Much richer integration of location-aware services with a variety of devices.
• 9. Collaborative mapping - people working together with friends and colleagues to build shared maps of places they care about.
• 10. Location based services will proliferate and become more useful to the end user.
• 11. We'll see the tech take shape and make more money in 2009.
• 12. Aggregation services will change from just drinking from the fire hose to become very specific aggregation tools, perhaps with very specific use cases.
• 13. The pace of evolution may really slow down by comparison, but the user experience will be far better.
• Ori Fishler, Top 5 Web Technology Trends for 2009 on Edgewater Technology Weblog
• 1. Actionable Web Analytics as part of Enterprise BI and Dashboards.
• 2. Phone Browser Compatibility
• 3. Location based services
• 4. Increased reliance on open source infrastructure products and technologies
• 5. Free is always a powerful word. Strong and reliable open source environments allow
• Richard MacManus et al., 2009 Web Predictions on ReadWriteWeb (added 2008-12-31)
• 1. Twitter announces they have a plan to make money.
• 2. New real-time web app launches that integrates Twitter, FriendFeed & more.
• 3. Professional twitterer becomes a real job.
• 4. Twitter will start to embed advertising into its users streams.
• 5. Twitter will be acquired (probably by Facebook).
• 6. Twitter is going to continue to grow and eventually get acquired, while Facebook is going to see further decline.
• 7. Facebook signs up to OpenSocial.
• 8. Facebook will continue to surprise.
• 9. Big companies will have incentive to give OpenID more support because of Facebook's domination.
• 10. Facebook Connect becomes new de facto way to login to web sites.
• 11. Facebook Connect authentication will become dominant method.
• 12. Facebook has one security incident too many, leading to a decline in popularity.
• 13. Microsoft will double-down on its Facebook investment, garnering more control of the company - and more access to the data.
• 14. Microsoft resurrects WebTV after buying out Netflix.
• 15. Microsoft will launch a competing platform with Apple's App Store.
• 16. Microsoft releases a cool online version of Office, but then Google releases an amazing new version of Google Docs.
• 17. Gmail will be the de facto login credential on the Web.
• 18. Google Reader gets themes.
• 19. The browser wars will further heat up.
• 20. Google Chrome adds plugins....
• 21. Google backlash begins.
• 22. Google will finally offer a comprehensive online storage solution and some kind of travel product.
• 23. Google loses goodwill, Yahoo gains.
• 24. Yahoo sells to a big media company, but it won't be Microsoft.
• 25. Amazon will further strengthen its position in the cloud computing market.
• 26. eBay oscillates between break-up and acquisition; it will eventually be acquired by Amazon.
• 27. The usual suspects will remain unacquired in '09: Digg, Twitter, Technorati. The one that does get bought is FriendFeed - by Google probably.
• 28. Lifestreams will continue to evolve.
• 29. iTunes adds social networking features; but it's still a closed development system.
• 30. If Apple finally enables its push server, mobile social networks and geolocation enabled apps will become a major topic.
• 31. New iPods released...now with VOIP app built-in.
• 32. New iPhone is released with video recording capabilities.
• 33. One of the major gaming platform companies will acquire iPhone development shops to corner the market on iPhone gaming.
• 34. Under pressure from iPhone, Android, Symbian, and RIM; Windows Mobile will attempt to reinvent itself.
• 35. Digg still not acquired by anyone.
• 36. Lifestreaming apps like FriendFeed will remain niche products.
• 37. Mixx concentrates on usability and starts gaining ground on Digg.
• 38. LinkedIn will grow in the public's consciousness and grow their revenue dramatically.
• 39. Apps that do filtering, inferring and recommendation have a great year.
• 40. The value of data portability and single sign-in becomes unmistakable after a privacy breach.
• 41. Consumer and regulatory backlash make online privacy into a key differentiator for major players.
• 42. Have cake and eat it too solutions will emerge as a strong option.
• 43. Exciting new open source projects will emerge and grow.
• 44. More contextual browsing technologies will hit the market.
• 45. Streaming web video to the living room will go mainstream.
• 46. P2P shows value for reducing cost of server farms.
• 47. VCs jump onto the SAAS bandwagon, but most ventures don't need the cash.
• 48. 2009 will be like 2002 for raising money or exiting.
• 49. More Indian start-ups go global with price-smashing strategy.
• 50. Health web apps start getting attention from mainstream people and media.
• 51. Netbooks stay hot...get lighter, faster, thinner, line between notebooks and netbooks blurs.
• 52. Media properties prominently experiment with different and innovative types of online advertising.
• 53. One or two interface developments will blow us away.
• 54. Out of work journalists band together and create some killer blogs.
• 10 Predictions for the Internet for 2009 on Trade Radar (added 01-01-2009)
• 1. More blogs!
• 2. Google will continue to dominate.
• 3. Linked-In will soar as waves of unemployed try to bolster their personal networks.
• 4. Amazon will take its place beside Google as one of the two technology leaders on the Internet.
• 5. Facebook will surpass MySpace in unique traffic and begin to pull away.
• 6. E*Trade will be acquired.
• 7. Advertisers will push publishers to accept CPA versus CPC.
• 8. With location awareness becoming ubiquitous, anonymity on the web will be degraded.
• 9. Monetization of certain popular sites will stall.
• 10. Yahoo will sell its search capability to Microsoft and Google will buy what's left.
• Ryan Lawler, Contentinople's Top 10 Predictions for 2009 on Contentinople (added 2009-01-03)
• 1. Hulu will hit 1 billion streams worldwide
• 2. Online video ad units will look more like broadcast units
• 3. Users will start to ditch pay TV for broadband
• 4. Behavioral ads will be 'targeted' by Congress
• 5. CDN consolidation will begin in earnest
• 6. Digital 3-D will go mainstream
• 7. Twitter will pull in 'significant' revenue
• 8. Online ad spend will start catching up to eyeballs
• 9. Royalty issues will kill streaming music sites
• 10. Internet video will be stuck on PCs - for now
• Mary Meeker,Technology / Internet Trends [PDF] on MorganStanley.com (added 2008-01-05)
• 1. Undermonetized Internet Usage Growth Drivers – Video + Social Networking + VoIP + Payments
• 2. Broadband + Mobile + Internet = Especially High Global Growers
• 3. Lots of Retail Share to Gain Amazon.com Should Continue to Gain Share USA; Online Penetration = 6% and Rising
• 4. Lots of Ad Share to Gain $288 Per Home vs. $818 for Newspapers Implies Upside
• 5. Search Should Continue to Become More Important
• 6. While CPMs / CPCs May be Under Near-Term Pressure, If Targeting / ROI
• 7. Continue to Improve (as they should) There Should Be Long-Term Upside
• 8. Best News = History Proves That Ads Follow Eyeballs, It Just Takes Time
• Sharon Besser, One 2009 Prediction you can count on on Imperva Blog (added 2008-01-05)
• 1. Companies with cogent business models that provide consumer value should survive / thrive
• Stanley Tang, 5 Internet Marketing & Social Media Predictions For 2009 on Stanleytang.com
• 1. Twitter Will Get Bought Out
• 2. Mobile Applications Will Take-Off
• 3. A New Tool To Help Us With Organization
• 4. Videos - Interactive And Live Streaming
• 5. Social Media Continues To Grow
• Jeff Nolan, 2009 Predictions on MyVenturePad (added 01-01-2009)
• 1. Consumers re-evaluate the notion of value.
• 2. Word of mouth marketing increases in importance.
• 3. A major American city will be without a daily newspaper.
• 4. Advertising as a primary business model for consumer web services will be abandoned.
• 5. Enterprise software nuclear winter
• 6. What SMB gives, SMB takes away
• 7. Role of government in business
• 8. Younger employees will simply be thankful to have a job
• Adam Weinroth, Nine E-Commerce Predictions for 2009 on Shop.org
• 1. Real-Time Customer Service
• 2. Communal Conversion
• 3. TWOM = Trusted Word of Mouth
• 4. E-Commerce Sovereignty
• 5. Focus on Per-Customer Value
• 6. Widespread UGC
• 7. Growth Through Accountability
• 8. International Intensity
• 9. User Experience Innovation
• What’s coming in on line retail and technology on Guidance.com
• 1. Mobile will NOT be the killer app for eCommerce…
• 2. The lines between on line and offline shopping will blur
• 3. Consumers will create their own personal shopping malls
• 4. “Smart” retail sites will treat shoppers as individuals
• 5. Commerce will become even more collaborative
• 6. The next wave for video? Customer reviews
• 7. Configuration: beyond the product, configure the entire purchase
• 8. Use tweets to capitalize on buzz
• 9. Corporations will “become” social
• 10. People might increasingly turn to social networks
• 11. Retailers will need to have someone (or a team) designated to be the “personality” of the company on line