Yahoo’s revamped search advertising platform goes live:
Earlier this week, Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly, Overture) announced that its Project Panama- a revamp of its paid search advertising platform- is finally going live. The changes will be rolled out progressively during the year and early next year, with advertisers in the US being invited to migrate to the new platform. The complete transition is expected to be completed in the first half of next year.
The latest announcement from Yahoo! has several implications for marketers, who are looking to distribute their search marketing spend across the main search engines. Over the past several years, Google’s Adwords program has established an almost unassailable lead over Yahoo! Search Marketing, as the pioneers of paid search marketing (Overture) remained almost static, with hardly any significant development that addressed the rapidly maturing search advertising community.
There were two main factors that we believe helped increase the gap between the two main platforms. One, Google Adwords is user friendly, not only from a functionality perspective but also from a user interface perspective, while one could say exactly the opposite about the Overture platform. Managing a campaign that is even a few hundred dollars in size and more than 50 keywords can become a nightmare for some marketers. Secondly, the popularity of Google and its significantly higher search traffic volume obviously makes it a more preferred option for marketers looking to acquire large volumes of traffic.
The changes:
Yahoo is launching a new Upgrade Center that will have all the information required to adapt to the new Sponsored Search. One of the important changes that the new platform will have is the manner in which the top 5 bids are listed. While currently each of the top 5 bids are listed, the new Sponsored Search will show only a range for the top positions, along with an estimate of an advertiser’s position for each bid.
The other big change that will be rolled out next year is how Yahoo ranks the ads. Until now, Yahoo has used a pure auction model where only the maximum bid price mattered in the ranking of the ads; however, next year will see the introduction of an Ad Quality score in addition to the maximum bid. The specific parameters that will go into determining the ad quality score are not known at this point, but based on my experience with Google Adwords, I presume it will include a combination of click through rates for an ad, the maximum cost per click that has been bid and the quality of the landing page.
If the above presumption is correct, then marketers have to pay much greater attention to various aspects of the campaign than just monitoring their bid prices. A couple of months ago when Google Adwords introduced changes to how it ranked ads with much greater emphasis on the quality of landing pages, paid search marketers were literally caught unawares, leading to quite a frenzy.
I’ve often noticed marketers devote all their attention to the traffic acquisition aspects ie. keyword research and bid management without considering the conversion aspect (the landing page quality at all). With traffic acquisition itself increasingly becoming dependent on how a site is set up for conversions, marketers are better advised to be prepared and devote resources to improve their landing pages.
It would like seem simple logic and common sense, since profitability of a marketing campaign is dependent on conversions and not merely traffic; yet, the frequency with which this aspect is ignored certainly warrants constant reiteration.
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