Any thoughts on the Assists column in reports?

[SearchEnginePPC]

Has anyone found this data useful, or actionable? Sure, I love seeing that a certain campaign has provided an assist to another campaign's ultimate lead or sale, but I wondering if anyone really knows what to 'do' with that data.

Thoughts? Examples? Feedback?

[MSI]

I have many thoughts, examples and feed back about this . My thoughts the day I saw the assists totals were thoughts of disappointment. They tell you how many assists, but not what other keywords generated them. I was told then, when I asked my rep, that if I added Full Analytics I would be able to see a report of these words. This was NOT the case. Again only the number of assists is listed. An example of my frustration is the fact that I was also told they could not provide me with this information either. I asked them what I can do with these numbers without knowing the search terms that generated them and they had no idea. I have told them my feedback is that they need to add this to the analytics information reports.

Wasn't I flabbergasted when just last week I asked for one account to be analyzed for optimization suggestions and the new rep suddenly sent me a report that contains all the words (and more) that must have generated the assists. It is called a "Subphrase Matching Account Detail (SAGE)" report. It is run for a specific time period and tells you EVERY raw search term the account took impressions on. Now this report tells you all the terms, how many impressions they took, and how many clicks they took, but no conversion info (which would identify the Assists). However it does contain enough info that you can make an intelligent decision about which keywords might be benificial to bid on directly. I am currently testing a group of keywords I got off this report.

So... if you want to know what keywords might have caused the assists this is probably the report to request, until Yahoo starts providing the specific keywords that generate the assists in an analytics report.

MSI

[Discovery]

MSI - Good story because your experience really speaks to the issue of a lot of new features at Yahoo and other platforms as well.

If one can't take action on their own with the data the ad network is providing then it is really of little value. Calling an account rep, requesting reports, waiting... and then analyzing the report and hoping it has actionable data is a futile process.

Assists is another piece of data I look at and go, huh is there anything really behind this that I can use? Outside of assists I really do like the improvments in Yahoo's reporting. The data has a smaller lag time, the reports can be customized, you can cross section the data and it is generally pretty fast. So they are going in the right direction, but have to continously think, lets give our advertisers this piece of data so they can do....?


Discovery