What is RAIS? Essentially it’s a unique feature that allows you to add elements like multiple page links, images, icons, video, optional form fields and product info to your search results on Yahoo! and Bing. This is a beta so you will need to be approved to participate in RAIS.
Why take advantage of this?
- Eye-catching enhancements
- Provides a richer and more engaging search user experience
- Extends the adCenter ad offering beyond text ads
- Increases user engagement with the ad
- Increases CTR for advertisers on their brand terms
- Helps advertisers build a stronger brand presence through search
This option is only available to the brand owner and only on exact match brand terms. It will only show on first position ads.
To set it up you will need to supply Yahoo! with your top performing brand keywords as exact match and fill out a creative template. Feel free to leave me a message on this post and I will get the template over to you. Yahoo! will then build out the campaign, and once complete you can review and activate within the interface.
These ads can be targeted by geography, demographic and day. Pricing is on a cost per click basis. This option is only available to desktop search. Advertisers are only charged for one click no matter how many times a user clicks on the various elements.
In order to get the RAIS ads to show over the regular brand ads, it is recommended that you increase your bid one to two times over the existing brand bids. Yes you read that correctly, you are bidding on the same keywords twice but only one of your ads will show. RAIS ads do not show for every search on the brand term so it is extremely important to keep your regular brand ads running to show when the RAIS ads do not. If your regular brand keyword has a bid of $1, you will want the RAIS keyword to have a bid of $2-$3. If your RAIS ad shows you will pay $.01 higher than the highest bid in the marketplace for that keyword. If you RAIS bid is not higher than the highest bid in the marketplace, your non-RAIS ad will show and you will pay based on that bid. The RAIS bid needs to be aggressive enough to win out the top position for that keyword since it is taking over the complete top placement and pushes all other ads to the side bar.
Below are some examples of the ad templates available:
Deep links and Image:
Deep Links, Image and form:
Pharmaceutical:
Within the interface you can draw a Rich Ad component report that will show all the different types of areas that were clicked on so you can use that data to continue to refine and optimize those ads.
As with anything related to search, everything is measurable, I would suggest testing this available option out to see whether this ad performs better than your current standard brand term text ad, conversion and impact-wise. It would also be smart to see whether or not you are paying that much more for the same term when the RAIS is viewed, and if you are, does that additional cost pay off?
For more information on RAIS please click here.
Here’s another link that highlights a Hewlett-Packard case study and their use of RAIS.