As a Google AdWords professional I’ve been involved in Paid Search Marketing for over 5 years. I even had to the opportunity to provide feedback to Yahoo! (which they didn’t disclose their real name) about the type of service features and advertiser would be looking for. Using these tools on a daily basis I’m always looking forward to new features or techniques they provide to speed along my day.
Yahoo Search Marketing Background
Yahoo’s purchase of Overture in 2003 signaled a serious intent to provide full service Internet Marketing using paid search, but what they didn’t do was address the advertiser’s basic needs for managing their ads. Yes, their “bid to position” is a simple model for many, but both Google and MSN’s bidding position by relevancy means a smart advertiser can obtain better ROI by top positions at lower costs. Yahoo’s search marketing platform suffered from outdated features and lacked new functionality such as:
- Regional ad targeting to display ads in defined countries or regions
- Dayparting where you can increase bid limits for peak buying times
- Ad rotation testing
- Advance reporting to allow studying which hours of the day peak sales occur or customized fields
Even MSN's new search marketing platform, released this year is beating Yahoo! in terms of features and functionality. An overhaul was long due, so for search advertisers the release of the Yahoo! Panama interface is a very welcomed development.
New Yahoo! Panama Features and Functionality
As a paid search advertiser your day can be very busy managing thousands of search terms and hundreds of ads or campaigns. Sometimes you need to react quickly to loss-revenue issues if spending spirals out of control as a result of click fraud or competitive pressures. The one thing you can’t afford is wasting time “digging” thru a website to find data about the state of your campaigns. Ease of use and easy-to navigate functionality is key.
The first view when you log into your Yahoo! Search Marketing account is the dashboard that begins to address this. "I’m a big fan of web analytics, so even though I prefer web tracking outside of the tools Google or Yahoo provide, this doesn’t mean I don’t discount their conversion reporting." Quite the opposite, I live in their interfaces and view them as instruments for the driving the car, so having a customizable dashboard views is one of the “cool features”. Yahoo!’s new views means I can make faster turns when necessary.
They are also incorporating a previously standalone service called "Search Optimizer" with a feature called the watch list. You can setup alerts at the campaign, ad level and even search term that provides time critical data if you’re Cost per Action is in danger. This helpful tool allows you to be more attentive of your top performing search terms, without having to spend lots of time actually doing it. And while mentioning managing costs, Yahoo! finally is on par with both Google and MSN by allowing ad campaign spending limits. Or to be more accurate they now allow multiple campaigns, which in the past they really only had one. That’s one feature I’ve been waiting on for quite some time.
Getting around the new interface is a big improvement and dare I say, even more intuitive than my long-term favorite Google! But there are still many features that I’d like to see from Yahoo!. One critical feature that is missing is the opportunity to bid on singular or plural variations of search terms. Rather odd limits of 50 negative search terms for the Advanced match (called broad in Google). Customized reports with the ability to do automatic mailings are a “would be nice to have” feature as well. Overall, the daily chore of managing a Yahoo! Search campaign will not be such a chore anymore.
Yahoo! is off to a good start with this new direction and when you combine the changes they will be making in the bidding structure, is a good time to concentrate your marketing efforts on the Yahoo! channel for the time being. Hopefully, since they have completely redesigned the system, waiting for new features will occur with more frequency than once every two years.
I like the new panama platform. It is a big improvement from the last platform they had. It is easy to see that the geo-targeting greatly improve the conversion in just one day.
Posted by: Andy Kong | December 05, 2006 at 08:32 AM