As of today, the first wave of advertisers are converting over to Yahoo’s new On Monday, along with a small group of other visitors (bloggers and authors such as Barry Schwartz, Jennifer Slegg, Andy Beal, Catherine Seda, Greg Sterling, and Mona Elesseily) to Yahoo Search Marketing Headquarters in Burbank, I enjoyed a live demo (more than a demo, since our ads showed up live on Yahoo Search, from our actual Overture, er, YSM, accounts). YSM is now totally rebuilt and operating on different machines with a different tech team, while the DTC team maintains the legacy system until the last advertiser is migrated off sometime in early 2007. A Long Ride into “ A lively narrative led by John Slade, Senior Director of Global Product Management, gave us a feel for the hectic but structured development process over the past 18 months leading to the countown to rollout yesterday, the day before Yahoo’s quarterly earnings call. Slade looked tired, which to us was a good sign. He spoke passionately about the feature set of the new product (“ In setting up my own dummy ads, I found the system intuitive to read as well as operate. The overall paradigm mimics Google AdWords, with the structure Account > Campaign > Ad Group > Ad being familiar to any search marketer today. It’s interesting to reflect back on the fateful day when Google rolled out version 2 of its AdWords platform, in February 2002. At that time, it essentially tipped its cap to the auction model and the pay-per-click concept popularized by Yahoo – and wound up paying a hefty patent settlement as a result. But what Google did to improve on that was significant. As the Yahoo team acknowledged, the current DTC is like an unsophisticated spreadsheet. Google’s ranking algorithm and campaign reporting and setup features moved AdWords significantly ahead of Yahoo, where it stayed for nearly five years. Today, Yahoo’s in the position of mimicking Google’s offering. So is it a me-too product? Well, from the perspective of our clients, that wouldn’t be so bad… we like AdWords – it scales, and it works. Now YSM does too. Key missing features now included in the new product are bidding by ad group and multiple ad rotation. Advertisers who migrate over will no doubt find these helpful and begin using them right away. A number of account migration features are available too, but may be more in the background for power users. There were also a number of unexpected features. Imperfect, but welcome, is a continent block feature. We got an extensive rundown of the new ad ranking formula. The pricing formula may include a larger than expected price discount for ads with very high relative quality score. Other relevancy factors will be included in the Quality Index. Yahoo won't reveal much, but in an upcoming newsletter for Page Zero Advisor subscribers, I'll get into more detail. I'm also hosting a PZCast audio roundtable of all the attendees of yesterday's demo. We're recording that Friday - again it will be available to PZ Advisor subscribers. (see page-zero.com for subscription info) Potential impact on search user satisfaction – the emphasis on quality creates better user satisfaction so both more revenue for Yahoo *and* potentially stems slide in search market share. But is it enough?
I had a quick discussion with Yahoo exec Josh Siegel that evening… he acted surprised ... as in... “so, a lot of advertisers would literally expect that
Posted by Andrew Goodman
| | Permalink
 |
 |
 |
The Traffick Search Engine Directory :: |
| » Internet Marketing » Internet Tools » Search Engines |
» Web Browsers » Web Portals » Webmaster Tools |
» About the Directory » Add URL » Traffick Report: Flock |
